Survey 1: Handprints and Handwriting (40,000 BCE-O CE)

Mesopotamian Cuneiform

To understand the world of Visual communication and how people perceive the world in what they see is to also go back in time to understand the earliest origins of writings. Writing is universal and it is interesting to see what kinds of methods were used in different cultures. One of the earliest forms of writing derived from Mesopotamia 3500-3000 BCE, and most of us have learned about it at some point in our lives. This system of writing was created by the Sumerians and it was called “cuneiform” also known as “cuneus”, because of its wedge-shaped style. Their method of writing was demonstrated using “pictographs” that were used to represent a word or an idea, it was later advanced to phonograms. Which are more decipherable because the writing resembled sounds, closer to what we understand as a word. Since paper did not exist yet, instead the medium for writing was used with clay blocks and a stylus which would be imprinted as various triangle forms.

Shown below is how Pictographs were understood and developed over time.

image source: https://www.theshorterword.com/cuneiform

Interesting Fact: Cuneiform is not considered a language. It also doesn’t contain any letters nor does it have an alphabet. Instead, images were used to convey syllables.

image source: https://www.ancient.eu/cuneiform/

Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Moving on to Hieroglyphics, which were developed shortly before 3100 BCE. It’s similar to cuneiform as there were no actual words but only pictographs and phonograms to represent the sounds.

Image source:https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyph

Image source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs

Interesting Fact: Most Egyptians could not read or write, only priests and scribes were literate.

As you can see the images are more distinguishable because they are represented in a more pictorial way. It looks like a more evolved version of cuneiform however, this ancient script is very difficult to understand. The writing actually began as “pictograms”, so as a matter of fact, the images depicted the objects shown. Later on, the images pertained to not only the appearance but the sounds of the word. This new form of writing would be known as “ideograms”. While Egyptians and Sumerians had similar methods of writing in visual communication by representing symbols through illustration, What was the major difference? Hieroglyphs only represented consonants whereas cuneiform represented all of the syllables which also included vowels. Although cuneiform began to evolve into more abstract shapes that were not as recognizable as the images from hieroglyphs, it was easier to distinguish. As pictographs are more discernable than ideograms.

Here is a modern-day pictograph that uses symbols to convey statistical research data. The visuals are straightforward and it communicates effectively for viewers to understand this statistic.