Table of Contents: |
Since the primordial time, spoken words and pictures have intermingled with each other as a means of communication. Human thought generally can be divided into two modes, the visual and the verbal. People use words to paint pictures verbally, and inversely have painted pictures to communicate an idea. A study published in the journal NeuroImage in 2017, by Elinor Amit, an affiliate of the Psychology , and Evelina Fedorenko of Harvard Medical School, has found that even when they were prompted to use verbal thinking, people created visual images to accompany their inner speech, suggesting that visual thinking is deeply ingrained in the brain. This is why writing and graphic design are intimately interrelated. Yet there is a more profound relationship between the two from an artistic perspective.
Both words and pictures are used in the act of creation; that is art. If texts are not primarily for creation but for communication, then writings, with their prescribed functions of educating and instructing, would seem to be only a secondary art form. Yet calligraphy, throughout its history, has had a curious relationship with art. Besides communicating the socio-cultural and scientific ideas of various civilizations into conceptual ideas, the nature and limitations of writing have sometimes influenced the form and direction of abstract art.
The development of visual communication design, from the radical experimentation of the early prehistoric artists of Cro-Magnon period, to the emergence of a globalized graphic design discipline, and its diverse manifestations of contemporary practice in various cultures starts with the history of writing, which is the most important aspect of visual information communication. Within a paradigmatic framework of design historiography, visual language and cultural theory, the history of writing must focus on the way designers have used image, text, print and symbol in response to changing paradigms of art and industry, new technologies, identity and politics of culture, to translate ideas into a visual communicative format.
A written message is presented within the boundary of semantic standards which refer to the meaning of the particular symbols, message representation, its context and how it relates to other collective memories within the culture. In fact , immediately after an observer encounters a message; on a book cover, a poster, a website, and so on, a huge array of visual background information, from its font type, size, color, layout, and illustrations provide her with a road map, based on cultural semantic standards, as to how to interpret, and comprehend the message.
The development of visual communication design, from the radical experimentation of the early prehistoric artists of Cro-Magnon period, to the emergence of a globalized graphic design discipline, and its diverse manifestations of contemporary practice in various cultures starts with the history of writing, which is the most important aspect of visual information communication. Within a paradigmatic framework of design historiography, visual language and cultural theory, the history of writing must focus on the way designers have used image, text, print and symbol in response to changing paradigms of art and industry, new technologies, identity and politics of culture, to translate ideas into a visual communicative format.
A written message is presented within the boundary of semantic standards which refer to the meaning of the particular symbols, message representation, its context and how it relates to other collective memories within the culture. In fact , immediately after an observer encounters a message; on a book cover, a poster, a website, and so on, a huge array of visual background information, from its font type, size, color, layout, and illustrations provide her with a road map, based on cultural semantic standards, as to how to interpret, and comprehend the message.
The first written languages were inherently visual- developed in ancient Eastern ideogrammatic writing systems, where a single image represented a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of words) to the first pure alphabets (properly known as "abjad" and which represented consonants ) of ancient Egypt that mapped single symbols to single phonemes.
Jiroft Civilization
In 2000, flash floods along the Halil River in southern Iran city of Jiroft swept the topsoil off thousands of previously unknown tombs. It has long been hypothesized that Jiroft is the legendary land of Aratta, a “lost” Bronze Age kingdom of renown, which reputedly exported its magnificent crafts to Mesopotamia.
According to texts dating from around 2100 BC. Aratta's artistic output was so highly regarded that around 2,500 BC, the Sumerian King Enmerkar sent a message to the ruler of Aratta requesting that artisans and architects be sent to his capital, Uruk, to build a temple to honor Inanna, the goddess of fertility and war. Enmerkar addressed his letter to Inanna: “Oh my sister, make Aratta, for Uruk's sake, skillfully work gold and silver for me! (Have them cut for me) translucent lapis lazuli into blocks, (Have them prepare for me) electrum and translucent lapis!" beseeched the Sumerian ruler.
"Jiroft leads me to imagine that Iran had a much greater influence on Mesopotamian culture than I previously thought," observes Jean Perrot, the grand old man of Middle Eastern archeology in France. According to the French epigrapher François Vallat, who compares Jiroft to the Elamite kingdom of southwest Iran; when you consider that Uruk was the heart of the Sumerian civilization and its king asked another ruler about 2000 kilometers away to send his artisans to build his monuments for him, we realize that the quality of Jiroft's work must have been extraordinary, and these craftsmen were to be renowned throughout the ancient world.
Yet even if it turns out that Jiroft is not Aratta, it is nonetheless an essential clue for a better understanding of the days when writing flourished and traders carried spices and grain, gold, lapis lazuli and ideas from the Nile to the Indus.
Prior to the discovery of the Jiroft tablets, the oldest writing had been found at the Susa site, which remained from the period of reign of a monarch of Khutelutush-In-Shushinak and it dates back to 1200 BC era. It has always been believed that the cuneiform was introduced by the Akadians to the Elamites around 2200 BC. However, with the discovery of Jiroft's tablets, its writing language is believed to have emerged around the same time Mesopotamia began to develop a writing system. According to the carbon-14 tests carried out on the layers in which the Jiroft inscription was discovered, this inscription was dated to 2500 BC. Although such tests have not yet been carried out on the Mesopotamia inscription.
These visual languages later inspired the Phoenicians and Greek alphabets, and eventually the Aramaic alphabet.
The Sumerian priesthood developed their writing system in about 3100 BC. They designed simplified images of their temple properties on chunks of wet clay and marked the number of the items on that clay. This was a reliable accounting report -- a message -- for keeping track of the changes in the wealth of a temple. After allowing the wet clay to bake hard in the sun, these tablets conveyed a recorded graphic message to various stakeholders. Examples of this early system represents some of the earliest texts found in the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr around 3300 BCE. These tablets were the first manifestation of graphic design as a mean to conveying a conceptual message in a fast, simple and economic way1 .
 |
 |
A Sumerian Writing Tablet. |
The Sumerian priesthood developed their writing system in about 3100 BC. They designed simplified images of their temple properties on chunks of wet clay and marked the number of the items on that clay. This was a reliable accounting report -- a message -- for keeping track of the changes in the wealth of a temple. After allowing the wet clay to bake hard in the sun, these tablets conveyed a recorded graphic message to various stakeholders. Examples of this early system represents some of the earliest texts found in the Sumerian cities of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr around 3300 BCE. These tablets were the first manifestation of graphic design as a mean to conveying a conceptual message in a fast, simple and economic way1 .
In Sumer, at first the pictures of things represented those very same things ( these are called pictographs). Then certain pictures represented some ideas and concepts (these are called ideographs) and finally they represented sounds. The writing characters of the Sumerians were adopted by the East Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia and Akkadian became the first Semitic writing system that would be used by the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Cuneiform System of Writing
The most ancient writing system that was evolved in Mesopotamia, is called cuneiform, an 18th century coinage from Latin and Middle French roots meaning “wedge-shaped”. This writing system using a reed and applied on wet clay used between 600 and 1,000 characters that were either words, parts of words or syllables and therefore they were not letters of an alphabet. The earliest languages written in Cuneiform were Sumerian and Akkadian. Sumerians developed a large body of phonetic symbols and soon they needed to develop grammatical elements by phonetic complements to be added to their logograms and ideograms. Moreover since Sumerian had many identical sounding (homophonous) words, some logograms yielded identical phonetic values, which are identified in modern transliteration. As well a logogram was polyphonic since represented a number associated phenomena such as "night", "stars", "moon", "dark", which had more than one phonetic value .
It is highly probable that the Egyptian hieroglyph is evolved from cuneiform the-spot invention. Nevertheless, cuneiform continued to be used until the first century AD.
The most ancient writing system that was evolved in Mesopotamia, is called cuneiform, an 18th century coinage from Latin and Middle French roots meaning “wedge-shaped”. This writing system using a reed and applied on wet clay used between 600 and 1,000 characters that were either words, parts of words or syllables and therefore they were not letters of an alphabet. The earliest languages written in Cuneiform were Sumerian and Akkadian. Sumerians developed a large body of phonetic symbols and soon they needed to develop grammatical elements by phonetic complements to be added to their logograms and ideograms. Moreover since Sumerian had many identical sounding (homophonous) words, some logograms yielded identical phonetic values, which are identified in modern transliteration. As well a logogram was polyphonic since represented a number associated phenomena such as "night", "stars", "moon", "dark", which had more than one phonetic value .
It is highly probable that the Egyptian hieroglyph is evolved from cuneiform the-spot invention. Nevertheless, cuneiform continued to be used until the first century AD.
 |
| Early Writing Tablet recording the allocation of beer, 3100-3000 B.C.E, Late Prehistoric period, clay, probably from southern Iraq. |
Egypt developed writing shortly after the Sumerians. Greeks called the Egyptian writing characters hieroglyphs in about 500 BC. The reason was that the Egyptian writing was mainly used for holy texts; hieros and glypho mean 'sacred' and 'engrave' in Greek. Egyptian legends attribute the invention of language to Taautos, from Byblos in Phoenicia, who was the father of tautology or imitation. He is also credited with the first written characters in two millennium BC .
|
 |
| Hieroglyphs. Stele of Minnakht, Chief of the Scribes (c. 1321 BC) |
|
 |
| Merneptah Stele — also known as the Israel Stele or Victory Stele of Merneptah — is an inscription by the Ancient Egyptian king Merneptah (R;1213 to 1203 BC), which appears on the reverse side of a granite stele erected by the king Amenhotep III. It was discovered by Flinders Petrie in 1896 at Thebes. |
Vignette from the 'Book of the Dead' of Queen Nodjmet. She was married to Hrihor, a High Priest of Amun who was the king of Upper Egypt circa 1080-1074 BCE during the late 20th Dynasty. This was a period of Egyptian decline and political instability.
Most of the treasure of the ancient literature is written in Akkadian, the most ancient of Semetic languages, which is written in a logosyllabic cuneiform writing system of Sumerian origin. There were many other Semitic languages such as Amorite, Ugaritic and that of the Canaanites of Phoenicia . Many of these alphabets were derived from the Phoenician linear quasi-alphabet of 22 signs, first attested at Byblos and externally similar to the Proto-Byblian script. The Phoenician was the origin of the European alphabets, whereas all the Asiatic alphabets are derived from the Aramaic variants of the Phoenician.In fact many of the existing scripts such as Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew among others are derived from Phoenician characters. Greece in the 8th century BC adopted the Phoenician alphabet with very little variation. According to Herodotus:
The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus - amongst whom were the Gephyraei - introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians; they were taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as the Phoenician characters - as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them. The Ionians also call paper 'skins' - a survival from antiquity when paper was hard to get, and they did actually use goat and sheep skins to write on.
 |
Translation of the Phoenician text according to Sabatino Moscati:To [our] Lady Ishtar. This is the holy place // which was made and donated // by TBRY WLNSH [= The faries Velianas] who reigns on // Caere [or: on the Caerites], during the month of the sacrifice // to the Sun, as a gift in the temple. He b//uilt an aedicula [?] because Ishtar gave in his hand [or: raised him with her hand] // to reign for three years in the m//onth of KRR [=Kerer], in the day of the burying // of the divinity. And the years of the statue of the divinity // in his temple [might be ? are ?] as many years as these stars. |
 |
Phoenician alphabet |
The Latin alphabet is originated from the Etruscan alphabet, in the 7th century BC. The Etruscans themselves derived their alphabet from the Greek colonists in Italy, more specifically from the Cumae alphabet. The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the alphabet of Phoenicians who were living on the coastal area of Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. The earliest inscription in Latin characters, dating from the 7th century BC, was made on golden brooch known as Praeneste Fibula (preserved now in the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome). It is written from right to left and reads:
 |
The Praeneste fibula at the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome. It reads:
MANIOS:MED:FHEFHAKED:NUMASIOI
(in Classical Latin: Manius me fecit Numerio)
Manius made me for Numerius.
|
Another inscription, dating from the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 6th century BC, was engraved on a small pillar (cippus) found in the Roman Forum. It is written vertically on the four faces of the pillar in bustrophedon style.
 |
| The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet. |
 |
| The Duenos inscription |
Reflecting the obvious similarity between the Latin alphabet and the Chalcidian variety of the Western group of Greek scripts used at Cumae in Campania, Southern Italy, the earlier hypothesis suggested that Latin letters were derived directly from the Greek alphabet. However, this hypotheses is now rejected since: i. Latin letter names are of Etruscan origin, and ii. The sound of F, in most ancient documents, is represented by combination FH, which was peculiar to the Etruscan writing system.
According to a Roman legend, which credits introduction of alphabet into Latinium to Evander, son of the Cimmerian Sibyl. This was supposed to have happened 60 years before the Trojan war. However, there is no historically sound basis to this tale. This makes the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic alphabets emerging at the time.
The Romans further developed the alphabet by using 23 letters from the Etruscans. The Roman letters ABEZHIKMNOTXY was exactly the same as the Etruscans'. But the letters CDGLPRSV were redesigned. The Romans also added two Phoenicians letters, the F and Q, that were discarded by the Greeks. They placed Z at the end of the alphabet because for a while it appeared redundant. The U and W were slowly added and based on the letter V by the year 1000 and the J, which was based on the I was added by 1500.
Three important innovations by Romans were: first, the introduction of serifs, which are the short finishing strokes at the end of letters, second, the graphic design of thick and thin strokes, and third lowercase letters. The most important of these was of course the lowercase letters which were developed because to copy a text scribes needed quicker and smaller versions of the letters. The first system of lowercase letterforms was known as the semi-uncial. Spacing between words was not generally adopted until the eleventh century. Punctuation marks developed in the 16th century when printing became prevalent.
 |
| A latin inscription in Ephesus |
The Romans further developed the alphabet by using 23 letters from the Etruscans. The Roman letters ABEZHIKMNOTXY was exactly the same as the Etruscans'. But the letters CDGLPRSV were redesigned. The Romans also added two Phoenicians letters, the F and Q, that were discarded by the Greeks. They placed Z at the end of the alphabet because for a while it appeared redundant. The U and W were slowly added and based on the letter V by the year 1000 and the J, which was based on the I was added by 1500.
Three important innovations by Romans were: first, the introduction of serifs, which are the short finishing strokes at the end of letters, second, the graphic design of thick and thin strokes, and third lowercase letters. The most important of these was of course the lowercase letters which were developed because to copy a text scribes needed quicker and smaller versions of the letters. The first system of lowercase letterforms was known as the semi-uncial. Spacing between words was not generally adopted until the eleventh century. Punctuation marks developed in the 16th century when printing became prevalent.
Although after the birth of Islam in 7th century AD, Arabic inscriptions became prevalent in the western and central Asia, the origin of the Arabic script also goes back to the Phoenician alphabet, which a branch of it evolved into Aramaic, which evolved into Modern Hebrew and Nabataean. The Nabataeans, which established the kingdom of Petra in what is modern-day Jordan from the 2nd century BC were of Arabic origin. They wrote with a highly cursive Aramaic-derived alphabet that would eventually evolve into the today's alphabet. The Nabataeans endured until the year 106 AD, when they were conquered by the Romans, but Nabataean inscriptions continue to appear until the 4th century AD, coinciding with the first inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet, found in Jordan.
 |
| The oldest piece of Phoenician writing that we've discovered was from the Phoenician city of Byblos (today in Lebanon) dating to the 11th century BCE. From there, however, Phoenician began to appear in more and more cities around the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were a maritime people, who built up a society of traders who shipped products to and from the various cities along the Mediterranean coast. As they built up their trade networks, they established colonies across Northern Africa and the Middle East, and even some in Southern Europe. |
 |
| Greek and Nabataean inscriptions at Petra. It is estimated that Petra has been built in the sixth century BC by Nabataeans people, who created one of the greatest ancient civilizations in the Middle East, with its own alphabet, on the basis of which the conventional Arabic alphabet was formed. |
 |
| Kufic Script, Toledo, Spain, 11th century AD |
After, the emergence of Islam, the Umayyad state chancery employed many skilled Persian scribes from the Iranian court. The administrative language of Umayyads officially changed from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) to Arabic during Hajjaj ibn Yusuf governorship of Iraq. The records of administrative documents, dīwān al-rasā’il (bureau of letters) transferred from Pahlavi to Arabic. The early Arabic alphabet had 15 distinct letter-shapes for 28 sounds, but did not contain any dots, which were a later addition by the Persians scribes, who used them to differentiate between the different sounds. They also added the vowel marks and the Hamza in the latter half of the seventh century.
 |
| Naskh script at Ben Ali Youssef Medersa, Morocco,16th century AD |
Generally speaking, there are two variants to the Arabic alphabet: Kufic and Naskh. The Kufic script is angular, which was most likely a product of inscribing on hard surfaces such as wood or stone, while the Naskh script is much more cursive. The Kufic script appears to be the older of the scripts, as it was common in the early history of Islam, and used for the earliest copies of the Qu'ran.
 |
| Atigh Jame' Mosque, Shiraz, 14th century AD. |
The earliest examples of Chinese writing date to the late Shang period (ca. 1200 BC). These are the so-called Oracle Bone Inscriptions (甲骨文--jiaguwen) which were found at the site of the last Shang capital near present-day Anyang in Henan province.Later on the bronze inscriptions (金文 --jinwen) which were texts casted or carved into the surface of vessels integrated the concept of aesthetics into the design during the Eastern Zhou dynasty (ca. 1150-771 BC). Nevertheless,the language and the calligraphic style were similar to those found on the oracle bones.
 |
A bronze inscription (jinwen) casted into the surface of a vessel depicts a harmonious calligraphic composition. |
 |
| The 'Lantingji Xu'', Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion 3 is the most famous work of Chinese calligrapher Wang Xizhi, created in year 353. |
The so-called "classical Chinese" (文言 -- wenyan) which had remained more or less intact until the late 19th century was written on bamboo strips on ancient times. These were manuscripts, that recorded the Chinese philosophical texts, such as the Laozi, Liji, and Lunyu. They are dated from the early fifth century BC. The characters were written with a hard brush or a stick on a prepared surface of bamboos tied together with strings to form a roll. Beside bamboo, texts were also written on wooden tablets and silk cloth.
 |
| A Chinese traditional title epilogue written by Wen Zhengming in Ni Zan's portrait by Qiu Ying.(1470–1559) |
Footnotes:
- Algaze, Guillermo (2005) "The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization", (Second Edition, University of Chicago Press.
- See : R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (revised ed C. A. R. Andrews), The British Museum Press , 1985, London. R.B. Parkinson and S.Quirke, Papyrus, Egyptian Bookshelf, The British Museum Press, London ,1995. S. Quirke and A.J. Spencer, The British Museum book of anc, The British Museum Press
- This calligraphy describes a gathering of 42 poets including Xie An and Sun Chuo at the Orchid Pavilion near Shaoxing, Zhejiang, during the Spring Purification Festival to compose poems and enjoy the wine. The poets had agreed to participate in a drinking contest. Wine cups were floated down a small winding creek as the men sat along its banks and whenever a cup stopped the man closest to the cup was required to drink it and write a poem. In the end, twenty-six of the participants composed thirty-seven poems.Richard Kurt Kraus, Brushes with Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 27.
No comments:
Post a Comment