As speech required individuals to be within earshot of each other, other mechanisms were needed to carry messages over distances over time. Simple drawings became pictographs, and pictographs became standardised within each culture beginning the history of handwriting.
The artists used charcoal and ochre to
create the images and exploited the natural contours of the cave walls to give
their drawings a three dimensional effect. These drawings were abstract.
Pictographic writing was common throughout
history before the invention of letterforms and was often highly detailed works
of art that illustrated specific events. Syllabic forms were similar but became
simplified as it became important to communicate more generically and so they
were standardised examples of this are early forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs and
Chinese ideograms.
Examples of Ancient Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese ideograms.
Cuneiform was a style of writing developed by the Sumerians, one of the
earliest urban societies in the world. It
was another pictographic writing system that came from the Latin word meaning wedge-shaped, where figures were pressed
into soft clay tablets with the slanted edge of a stylus, which gave them that
unique wedge shape. The word for fish existed at first as a simple pictorial
representation of a fish, the pictogram later developed into an abstract
ideogram that came to represent not only things but also sounds. This set of
symbols gained almost universal acceptance in the Middle East, with the oldest
dating tablet made in 3100 BCE, from the Sumerian city of Unik. This writing
system was used to write stories, religious documents, history and poetry as
well as representing trade stock and goods, the pictographs were written from
top to bottom and right to left, and was continually used for 35 centuries.
A clay tablet from 4,000
BCE with wedge-shaped markings.
The Ancient Egyptians used two kinds of
writing styles that were logograms and syllabic signs, the syllabic signs are
similar to the word signs we use today such as: &, $ and =. The term
Hieroglyphic originated from the Greek words Hiero and glyphe which
means holy and glyphic, which in turn means writing. Modern English has a sound
for each letter where the Ancient Egyptians had a sound for each syllable and
occasionally for multiple syllables, this resulted in hundreds of syllabic
signs. Only royalty, priests, scribes and government officials could use and
understand hieroglyphs, as they were difficult to learn and recreate. The
logograms were used to write down prayers and stories, royal documents, guides
of the after world on tomb walls and to decorate jewellery, stones and metals. Hieroglyphs
were written on papyrus, painted on walls or carved into stone and became
simplified for freer forms to be written quicker around 1500 BC, where it became
known as Hieratic script (priestly writing). This script was used almost
exclusively for religious writing, however it was later used for commerce.
1,000 years later the script was simplified again and become more widely used,
this was called demotic script, the script of the people. Around 2400 BC the
Egyptians started using papyrus and reed brushes for writing as the ink flowed
more smoothly on papyrus which allowed scribes to write quicker and symbols
became less angular and more rounded.
Cursive
hieroglyphs on papyrus- logography 3,200 BC – AD 400.
Top image- Hieratic script from 1200 BC, bottom image- Demotic script from 300 BC.
The Semites of Syria and other parts of the
Middle East created their own system of writing that was based on the Egyptian
syllabic signs between 1500 and 1000 BCE. They abandoned all of the
multi-consonant signs and created a new syllabary of around 30 signs, these
consisted of one consonant plus any vowel. These early systems have died out
but they are thought to have influenced the syllabic writing form that spread
through the world.
Ugaritic
script, developed in 1400 BC, employs 30 simplified Cuneiform signs.
The city of Byblos was famous for exporting
papyrus which was used as a writing material but the Phoenicians of the city
also created a new syllabic writing style that comprised of 22
phonetically-based symbols, all of which were consonants. The reader would fill
in the vowels based on structure and context, so fnd could be understood as find,
found or fond. The Phoenicians were seafaring traders that carried their
writing throughout the Mediterranean where they set up colonies and cities all
around Northern Africa and the South of Asia, from Yemen to Ethiopia where the
ancient language is still used today. Phoenician was the first writing system
that represented sounds instead of objects and was written right to left,
various writing systems of today can be traced back to Phoenician such as:
Arabic, Greek, Latin, Etruscan and Hebrew.
An
example of ancient Phoenicia which dates back to 1500 BC.
Around 100 years
later, the Greeks liberally borrowed Phoenician writing as they kept the forms,
names and order of signs in the alphabet and the left to right direction of
writing. However, the Greek form would later change in both shape of the
letters and in other key structures of the writing form and gradually, they
developed a writing style with a consistent left-to-right format, as beforehand
they followed no fixed direction. The
Greeks systematically plugged in six signs with weak consonants – sounds that
were used only in the Phoenician language and were no use to the Greeks. They
were turned into the vowels a, e, i, o, and u. After this change the
remainder of the symbols were no longer needed to represent syllables and were
then used as consonants, and for the first time an entire alphabet composed of
consonants and vowels existed.
The Greek alphabet, which had both consonants and
vowels, is the basis of the alphabet we use today.
This alphabet later found its way to the
Etruscans of Italy, the Copts of Egypt and the Slavonic people of Eastern Europe;
the Etruscans adopted much of the art and religious beliefs of the Greeks,
which also included the Greek alphabet. The Etruscan civilisation slowly waned
following the expulsion of the Etruscan King, Tarquinius Superbus, in 524 BC
and within a few centuries the Roman Republic became the master of Italy. The Latin
alphabet that is used in modern times was created by the Etruscans and the Romans
but had only 23 letters as j, u and w were missing; there was no need for a w, the j was represented
by the i and the u was written as v. In
300 BC the letter g was added and in
100 BC z was added, borrowed from
Greek words.
The development of letterforms changed from
the abstract, linear forms of the Greeks to squared signs that became rounded
and joined when less carefully drawn by the Romans. The capitalised versions of
the alphabet were called Capitalis Quadrata, which were later transformed into
Rustica Capitals, which displayed a freer form and were very condensed in width
so that more text could fit onto parchment and papyrus. By 400 AD letterforms
became less formal in shape and began to flow together to save time and space,
these were the earliest sign of lowercase letterforms with ascenders,
descenders and ligatures between letters.
Top image- Capitalis Quadrata, bottom image- Rustica Capitals.
The Latin or Roman alphabet is now the
world’s most prolific and widespread of them all.
