Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs from stone wall in the Village of the Great Kivas in New Mexico.

A petroglyph is an image carved or etched into rock. Essentially, a petroglyph is made by

scratching away the uppermost surface of a rock to reveal rock of a different color underneath.
The petroglyph is among the earliest known forms of art and record-keeping, and
prehistoric petroglyph exist around the globe, some dating back as far as ten thousand years.

Hieroglyphics

A section of the Papyrus of Ani showing cursive Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Hieroglyphics is a system of writing which uses logograms, rather than an alphabet, to record a
language. Logograms are single characters which may represent an idea, a subject, or a word;
several modern languages use logograms including Chinese and Japanese.

Ideograms

Example of Chinese Ideograms.

An ideogram is a symbol, often used within a written language, which utilizes a picture, rather
than letters, to represent a particular idea or concept. This type of image is usually conceptual or
abstract in nature, as the image frequently represents something greater than what can be
expressed through a direct representation.
One contemporary civilization which uses an ideogrammatic rather than an alphabetic written
code is the Japanese.

Pictographs

Example of ancient pictograph.

A pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of
writing, examples having been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 B.C.

Alphabet

Example of the Braille alphabet.

The letters of a language, arranged in the order fixed by custom. They are many alphabets across
the world. Three examples of alphabets are Greek, Arabic and Braille. The alphabet that is the
Western standard today is the Roman Alphabet.

Qoph

The 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

IDEOGRAMMATIC CODES
Advantages
-It is closer to the representation of things:
after all, you go directly from the idea to
the paper, whereas in alphabetical
systems, you must go through the sounds
(idea-sounds-letters).
-The biggest interest of an (artificial)
ideographical system is that it could be
read in any language. China has a huge
territory, with many different cultures and
many different languages. When people
from different regions talk together, they
don't understand each other. But because
they share the same writing system all
over China, and it only writes ideas and
not the sounds used to communicate them,
every Chinese can read a given text in his
own language. For example, the ideogram
for sun will be pronounced XXX by a
Cantonese but ZZZ by a mandarin
speaker. Yet, both would write the same
text and understand it when they read it.
Disadvantages
-Using theses codes means that, in
learning to write, there is an immense
number of different signs to be learnt, not
only 26 letters but there is no such thing as
alphabetical order, so that dictionaries,
files, catalogues, etc., are difficult to
arrange and linotype is impossible; that
foreign words, such as proper names and
scientific terms, cannot be written down
by sound, as in European languages, but
have to be represented by some elaborate
device. But You need to master thousands
of little symbols to be able to write a
language you already speak.

ALPHABETIC CODES
Advantages
-In most languages the number of
phonemes (speech sounds) is only around
forty, with a range of between twelve to
sixty, a limit probably due to the restricted
range of sounds that humans can
distinguish in listening or articulate in
speaking. It defines the maximum number
of letters needed to represent them, which
need to be learnt. Since the necessary
letters are so few in number, they can be
simple and distinctive, and easy to write
and to copy.
Disadvantages
-We do not naturally consciously hear as
separate elements in our speech the speech
sounds that are distinguished in a language
to make up its words, and which are the
building blocks of alphabetic spelling. We
hear them as part of the continuous sound
wave. To map spelling to sound requires
an explicit and abstract analysis of what
we hear.

There are two major modern communication tools that is able to combine pictographic,
ideogrammatic and alphabetic codes. These devices are the computer and the cell phone.
Modern communication tools which combine pictographic/ ideogrammatic/ alphabetic codes?
The Computer and The Cell phone.

Surface Materials
Difference between Papyrus and Paper
Papyrus is a product of the water reed of
the same name found along the banks of
the Nile River in Egypt. It was probably
made from the outer skin since the center
is pithy. Layers of the reed were laid on a
stone slab side by side and the next layer
was laid on top of the first at right angles
to those on the bottom. The whole mass
was then moistened with water, pressed,
and dried, resulting in a laminated mass.
The dried material was hammered to make
it more compact and rubbed with a smooth
stone to produce a writing surface.
Samples of papyrus have been found
dating back to 3,500 B.C. Greeks and
Romans also wrote on it, and its use
persisted until about the 10th century A.D.
when overproduction or disease wiped out
the crops.

Paper developed separately in China

around 200 BC. It differs from papyrus in
that the plants have been beaten to
separate the fibers, suspended evenly in
water, placed on a webbing to drain off the
water, and dried. The beating allows a
hydrogen bonding to form between the
fibers. This hydrogen bonding gives paper
its cohesion and tearing strength. Paper
can be made from any cellulosecontaining plant such as cotton, hemp,
wood chips, bagasse, straw, kenaf, etc.
Paper derives its name from papyrus and
is a transferred application of an old name
to a new material.

Before the advent of paper, there were many different surfaces used for writing and painting on.
Some of these surfaces are bark, stone, papyrus, clay, vellum (skin of an unborn calf),
bamboo slips.

Example of ancient clay slab

used for writing.

Example of medieval vellum used

for writing.

Example of Asian
bamboo slips.

Different tools were also used to write on each of these surfaces:

BARK - knives, berries

STONE - animal blood, berries, rock (berries and animal blood were used for their
pigments almost like paint on the walls) (rock was used to scratch the outer layer of the
stone off to reveal the under layer, normally a different colour)

PAPYRUS - reed pens (made by cutting and shaping a single reed straw or length
of bamboo)

CLAY- stylus (reed pen)

VELLUM - quill pen ( pen made from a bird's feather)

BAMBOO SLIPS - writing brush and Chinese ink

Example of the reed pen (stylus).

Example of the feather quill pen