[bsder]

> Western readers have a hard time reading older writing - while eastern readers have no problem with very old texts.

That's simply not true.

Ancient Chinese calligraphy and language is so different that you have entire PhD fields about it.

By contrast, as someone who has studied basic Latin in high school, I can read stuff from the walls of Pompeii without issue. I can directly read Latin texts from 700AD or so with the standard difficulty of reading handwriting.

See: http://www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?lang=en&id_...

Now, perhaps if I were Chinese, I could read ancient graffiti on the Great Wall, but nobody seems to have ever mentioned that.