Chapter 1: The Invention of Writing is about the first records of forms of thought and communication from people. Some early markings found in Africa date back to over 200,000 years ago. Tools, pictographs, and ideographs show us the level of technology and communication these first thinkers functioned at. Pictographs were simple drawings or sketches that represented objects, animals, or people. Ideographs were symbols which represented ideas or words. Pictographs evolved over time and started to resemble letters by the end of the Paleolithic period. Copper replaced stone tools and weapons, and soon after the wheel was invented. The arrival of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia influenced village culture to become high civilization, a system of gods was created and a social order was established so that large numbers of people could live together. The need for recording information and identification forced writing to evolve, records were kept on clay tablets. Writing structure changed from a horizontal and vertical grid to writing horizontal from left to right and top to bottom. As writing evolved libraries were organized and laws were created. The Egyptians had their own unique writing called hieroglyphics that they used for over three millennia. These hieroglyphics could be found on tombs, coffins, furniture, buildings, jewelry, clothing, and more. The discovery of using the papyrus plant to make paper greatly and positively impacted Egyptian communication.
The Rosetta Stone was a major discovery, it allowed us to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was found by Napoleon's troops in the Egyptian town of Rosetta in 1799. The stone contained writing in two different languages and three different scripts. The three scripts were Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic script, and Greek. Jean-Francois Champollion realized that the hieroglyphics functioned as phonograms and was able to sound out two names, Cleopatra and Ptolemy, which led him to translate more writings and begin to build a vocabulary of glyphs. His translations made it possible for others to continue to unlock Egyptian writings after his death. This writing system was found to contain over 700 hieroglyphics.
How did the Greek script on the Rosetta Stone fit in with the Egyptian scripts?
I liked the image you chose because it relates to the reading we have done so far in class. It doesn't really have many grahpic design elements like typography, but I thought it was an interesting picture anyway.
ReplyDeleteI like this image as well. From what I can see I see some buffalo's on a cave wall. This is a good example of what we were studying in class too. The colors are the traditional colors that we studying with the warm browns and reds. Nice find.
ReplyDeletethis picture is the bare bones of what we have been studying. It shows the art of visual communication when it was used to communicate ideas and information. and it was the only way to do so.
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