this presentation highlights content from meg's history of graphic design chapter 1 the invention of writing in the process of the evolution of man the human hand developed an ability to carry food and hold objects when man began developing tools or implements with sharpened edges the creative process of design was born this process is over two hundred thousand years old during this journey speech developed writing which is the counterpart to speech became the visual form for communication over two hundred thousand years ago man began writing on cave walls and engraving on stone tablets to document and preserve history the development of the visual language had its earliest origins in the simple pictures known as petroglyphs one of the more famous prehistoric cave paintings was found in the south of france the last co-painting random placement and shifting scale signify prehistoric people's lack of structure and sequence in recording their experiences the black was made from charcoal the red yellows and oranges and browns were made from red and yellow iron oxides you can see sphere marks on the sides of some of the images suggesting the success of a hunt these simple drawings were early man's way of communicating and recording information early pictographs are significant to graphic design in two ways one they were the beginning of pictorial drawing with a tendency towards simplification figures were expressed with a minimum number of lines two pictographs eventually evolved into writing by the late paleolithic period some pictographs had been reduced to the point of almost resembling letters until recent discoveries in thailand it was thought that mesopotamia the land between the rivers tigris and euphrates was the cradle of civilization this is where man first began to live together in a village culture this fertile plain lying between the rivers is now part of turkey and iraq the sumerians settled in the lower part of mesopotamia they invented a system of gods and mythology they also invented writing this example of an early sumerian pictographic tablet dates 3100 bce the archaic pictographic script contains the seeds for the development of writing the information is structured by horizontal and vertical zones religion dominated life in the mesopotamian city-state scribes and priests were enormously powerful and writing evolved because the temple economy had a need for record keeping this archaic tablet fragment from the late 4th millennium bce the drilled hole denotes a number and the pictographs represent animals in this transaction of sheep and goats early pictographs represented objects they became less literal as sumerian's writing evolved the picture symbols evolved into signs which represented abstract ideas called ideographs the symbols for sun began to represent ideas such as day and light this clay tablet demonstrates how the sumerian symbol for star which also meant heaven god evolved as well as the one for head and water around 2800 bce scribes turn the pictographs on their sides writing in horizontal rows from left to right and top to bottom made writing easier and pictographs less literal they developed into early cuneiform writing by 2500 bce as civilization continued to evolve the need to represent the spoken word arose cuneiform was the first writing system which represented the sounds of objects the uniform symbols evolved to represent words and syllables with the same or similar sound as the objects depicted graphic symbols which represent sounds are called phonograms there are over 560 symbols in cuneiform and it was a difficult writing system to master this cuneiform tablet from uma dated around 2050 bce shows three workers are paid three bundles a day the total for six days is 54 bundles of reed writing enabled society to stabilize under law weights and measures were standardized this tablet from middle babylon dating between 1245 and 1233 bce shows a balanced account of seed written in cuneiform and found in the ruins of old babylon is the remnants of the world's oldest cookbook it contained a collection of recipes for dishes for the royal palace and temple the eight-foot steel bearing the code of hammurabi was developed between 1792 and 1750 bce it stood in the main temple of marduk at babylon above the densely textured law code written in cuneiform king hammurabi is shown on a mountaintop with the seated sun god shamash who ordered the king to write down the laws for the people of babylon a graphic image of divine authority as the source of the code becomes a powerful visual persuasion there are 282 laws gridded on 21 columns including a thief stealing from a child is put to death builders who build a house that falls and kills the owner shall be put to death whether pressed into clay or carved into stone as shown here mesopotamian scribes achieved a masterful control and delicacy in their writing and arrangement of strokes in the partitioned space as village culture developed so did a need to identify ownership of property and for craftsmen to identify their work seals came into use in the mesopotamian region as well as in egypt and asia the hittite stamp cylinder seal seen here combines decorative ornamentation with figurative images this most likely portrays a ritual possibly with a sacrificial offering on the right it has both an image on the side for rolling across a damp clay tablet and an image on the bottom for stamping because it allows images to be reproduced the cylinder seal can be seen as a precursor to printing the cylinder seals were prized as ornaments and status symbols as well as providing a unique personal signature babylonians were under seals on a quart around their wrist they were in use for over 3000 years this persian stamp seal circa 500 bce is from the region where the country of iran is today this seal incised into a precious blue quartz stone in a gold mount with its symmetrical design of a pair of heldic beasts locked into combat it probably belonged to a member of the royal family or of the high priesthood the last glory of mesopotamian civilization occurred during the reign of king nebuchadnezzar in the city-state of babylon during his reign babylon became the richest city in the world mesopotamian culture began to perish as the region came under the control of first persia then greece and finally rome the cuneiform writing system was passed on to subsequent cultures and was later simplified by the phoenicians into an alphabetic system in the next lecture i will discuss early and late egyptian writing systems and their impact on graphic design