The History of Writing

From Pictograph to PictographBy

Mandy Hansen

In the beginning, man utilized pictographs to depict the hunt on cave walls…

•Cave drawings and paintings in El Castillo cave in Northern Spain have been dated to be at least 40,000 years old – dating to the time of the last Neanderthals and earliest Homo sapiens

•Cave drawings contain the basic elements of writing – graphic marks made with a tool for the purpose of communication – and are therefore man’s earliest writing

•Cave paintings contain images important to the survival of early man – prey, predators, etc.

•Although great effort has gone into the creation of the images, they are simple and easily recognizable

The Sumerians began keeping written records on clay tablets; meanwhile 850 miles away the Egyptians

created Papyrus.

•Sumerian writing developed for record keeping purposes around 3200 B.C.E.

•Initially consisting of simple pictographs for keeping track of merchandise like wheat, barley and beer, the language developed complexity over time

•Eventually the Cuneiform alphabet contained over 600 characters, allowing more complex texts and stories to be written

•Ultimately the written Sumerian language became too complicated to be efficient

•Shortly after the development of Sumerian writing, the Egyptians developed hieroglyphic writing

•Hieros means sacred, glyph means engrave

•The hieroglyphic language was formed from a combination of alphabetic symbols and purely pictographic symbols

•The Egyptian invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C.E. allowed for the creation of the first portable records and texts

•The Phoenicians developed the first non-pictographic alphabet in which images represented sounds – a phonetic alphabet•The Greek alphabet, which added vowel sounds, forms the basis of the modern Latin alphabet used in many languages around the world•With a mere 26 characters, the modern Latin alphabet has allowed for endless variations in written language

Reading and writing became available to the masses with the invention of the Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press

•Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type, invented around 1440 C.E., for the first time made the duplication of written text easy and affordable

•Prior to the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, hand-lettered texts could take years to complete

•Other printing techniques with unmovable type were nearly as labor intensive as hand-lettering

•By the 1800’s, the ease of printing afforded by Gutenberg’s press had resulted in the creation nearly a million books

With the advent of modern computing, man returned to his pictographic roots

•With the development of graphic-based computing in the early 1970’s came the creation of the first graphic computer icons•The first graphic-based PC, the Xerox Star, included many of the icons we still use today •As PC usage increased so did the creation of graphic icons•By the time the internet came in to being, the graphic icon was part of our computing vernacular•The creation of a Favicon, or short cut icon, is considered an integral element of branding for businesses that will have a web presence•Although great effort has gone into the creation of these images, they are simple and easily recognizable•The pictographic icons of well branded companies represent things that are important to the survival of the modern man – social media, shopping, etc.

Hmmm….so have we come full circle?

Man’s desire to communicate easily and rapidly was the basis of the creation of writing, whether it be in the form of cave drawings or the evolution of the modern Latin alphabet. As we have moved into the technological age, that desire has not diminished – in fact, it would seem to me, that desire has become more pressing. While the creation of a web icon is a time consuming task, much like the creation of a cave painting or a writing system, the end result is a an infinitely duplicatable image – an image that can represent a commodity or emotion or an entire virtual network of people. As we move further down the path of communicating electronically by means of pictographs we risk complicating communication, just as the Sumerians did , by creating too many pictographic images for them all to be easily understood. However, through thoughtful understanding of communication and writing systems we have built in an advantage for continued understanding of newly generated web icons, through years of development we understand that an web icon next to a company name represents that companies web presence, etc. As such, I don’t foresee any slowing of new web icon generation.

Works Cited

The British Museum Explore. The British Museum. n.d. Web. 15 June 2012. <http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore >Epoch Times Sci. “Spanish Cave Art Confirmed as Europe's Oldest.” YouTube. 14 June 2012. Web. 15 June 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l97UNLwUOgM>“History of Writing” History World. n.d. Web. 15 June 2012. <http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab33> “Know Your Icons Part 1 – A Brief History of Computer Icons.” Psdtuts+. n.d. Web. 15 June 2012. <http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/theory/know-your-icons-part-1-a-brief-history-of-computer-icons/>Lo, Lawrence. Ancient Scripts. n.d. Web. 15 June 20, 2012. <http://www.ancientscripts.com/sumerian.html >Norman, Jeremy. “From Cave Paintings to the Internet: Chronological and Thematic Studies on the History of Information and Media.” History of Information. n.d. Web. 15 June 2012. <http://www.historyofinformation.com> “Table of the Phoenician Alphabet.” Phoenician International Research Center. n.d. Web. 19 June 2012. <http://phoenicia.org/tblalpha.html >