The Invention of Writing
“Writing is the Visual Counterpart of Speech”
ART2110:Typography, R.C.Tafoya, Instructor. Northwest College Wyoming
Alphabets remain one of humankind’s greatest achievements. Alphabetic writing became the glue that binds one generation to another over hundreds of years. With the alphabet, we have overcome the limits memory, time, and place.
3100 b.c. cuniform
This mark-making expanded to recording/communicating mathematics, history, law, astronomical observations, medicine. Myths, poetry, legends were recorded. So were the events in the life of a monarch. More and more complex information was recorded and over several hundred years the clay drawings evolved into rows of marks carefully inscribed by a wedge shaped tool called a stylus. Cuniform (Latin for “wedge-shaped”) writing this way was faster and took up less space.
| Timeframe Discussed |
| 25,000 b.c. Pictographs earliest attempt to record stories and ideas with simple representations of people, places, things |
| 3,000 b.c. Cuniforms Sumerians developed this system of writing symbols on clay tables with a stylus. Ideograms are symbols representing ideas and actions. |
| 1,000 b.c. Phonetics Phoenicians developed 22 symbols for sounds to represent spoken words thus connecting the spoken language to a written one |
| Review Key Terms & Concepts Discussed in This Lecture. |
| For a Printable Version of this lecture, click here. |
| Alphabetic writing on papyrus slowly transformed Western culture. A system of simple signs for the basic sounds of a spoken language put literacy within the reach of ordinary people. As this technology spread throughout the world from China and from Egypt and Phoenicia, priests and scribes lost their power over a culture and other forms of political organization were able to evolve. Greater access to information permitted ordinary people broader participation in public affairs. |
Here we are in the extravagant age of media, when printed paper inundates our mailboxes, films repeat themselves endlessly on cable television, television shows run 24 hours a day on commercial channels and computers spew forth lava-flows of data and images. All this would have astounded the first graphic designers, those ingenious few of our ancestors in dimmest prehistory who began to draw symbols for animals they hunted and later invented shapes for the sounds we make when we speak.
Pictographs, hieroglyphics, characters, and phonetic alphabets were our first graphic designs.
With them, and with the development of drawing, painting, printing, and photography, the human species has been able to remember its history and maintain its collection of discoveries and ideas. In a very real sense, the history of graphic design is the history of human communication.
15,000 b.c. Lascaux France
In North America – here in Wyoming – one can find ancient pictographs and petroglyphs on rock faces that are only now being interpreted. Its thought these marks were made:
• to remember visions
• to draw power from the supernatural
• to mark territory
more about Wyoming petroglyphs
One wonders – if these cultures had been left to develop on their own what sort of written language would have developed. Clues can be found in Central America. 25 books (called codex) written on paper made from the bark of the fig tree survive from the Mayan, the Aztec, and Mixtec cultures. These cultures flourished until the 1500s.
The Mexican codices are written in three different ways - these ways are similar around the world in the early writing of all cultures. One of these is pictographic writing which uses literal symbols: a hunter is a hunter, a temple a temple, a slave a slave. The second way the ancient Mexicans had of writing was by idographic symbols. These were symbols that suggested something else - in the same way a fish represented Jesus Christ for the ancient Christians - this system of symbols has no resemblance to the original ideas they represented.
more about Mezo-American Codices
Chinese calligraphy is another example of idographic writing - for example the idea of sorrow in Chinese writing is represented by a woman standing underneath a doorway , and she is painted twice.
1100 b.c. Chinese
The third class of writing used by the ancients is phonetic. In it the symbols have lost all connection to the objects they once represented and only denote sounds. The Mayan the Aztec and Mixtec used all three methods of writing and were beginning to develop alphabetic writing when the Spaniards arrived in 1519. Writing developed late in America - it never reached the level of development attained by the Egyptians or the Chinese. Development of writing in the native language of the Americas was destroyed by the Spanish missionaries who burned almost all of the hundreds of books. As I’ve said, only about 25 books remain.
The beginnings of our system of writing evolved in Mesopotamia - The area from Turkey, through Iraq to the Persian Gulf was once fertile enough that nomads from the surrounding regions settled there and began earliest urban civilizations. Being able to stay in one place for several generations and not worrying about food allowed people time to develop new technologies. The Mesopotamian innovation we are most interested in were the marks they developed that served as recordkeeping (recording a list of goods won in a war, or how much grain was promised to repay a debt.) This earliest writing took the form of marks scratched into clay with a pointed stick and seems to have developed around 3100 BC.
Mesopotamian civilization came to an end around 500BC when the great city-state Babylon was conquered first by Persians, then Greece, then Rome. By the time of the birth of Christ, Babylon was abandoned. Writing remained as a record-keeping technology. But innovations in writing were carried on by the Egyptians and Phoenicians.
3000 to 1800 b.c. cuniform writing evolved into hieroglypic.
Early written language – cuneiforms, hieroglyphs, Chinese calligraphy – all contained a built-in problem. As visual representations of whole ideas, many picture symbols were necessary and the number of people who could read or write a language with hundreds of symbols was limited to scribes or priests who devoted their entire lives to the study.
The people of what is now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel - the ancient culture we call Phoenicia - developed totally abstract and alphabetic system which was in wide use by 1500 BC.
The development of an alphabet that represents the sounds of a spoken language was a major leap forward in human communication.
Our alphabet – the “western” alphabet – evolved from cuneiforms and hieroglyphs into the Phonecian alphabet. It was developed further by the Greeks and Romans into the phonetic alphabet we now use.
But before we feel unduely proud of our western history, it appears that Asia was the first to develop a writing system that makes a break from pictoral symbols to symbols that stand for the sounds of a spoken language. The Korean alphabet, Hangul, is one of the most logical writing systems ever invented. It consists of 14 consonant and 10 vowel symbols - easy enough for the ordinary citizen to master. It was widely used in Asia by 1450 AD.
Egyptian manuscripts evolved into a fairly consistent format: One or two horizontal bands, usually colored, ran across the top and bottom of the manuscript. Vertical columns of writing separated by ruled lines were written from right to left. Images were inserted adjacent to the text.
Egyptian culture survived for over three thousand years. Hieroglyphics, development of paper, and illustrated manuscripts were its most important legacy. With the development of Mesopotamian writing, these innovations would lead directly to the development of the alphabet by the Phoenicians and Grecians.
400 b.c. Greecian writing on paper.