Writing Down The Age

Today we just pick up pen and paper and begin to write in which ever language is our forte! But have you given thought to how man has come so far from the time of the cave paintings and the cuneiform?

25000 B.C.

Cave painting were created by 'stone age' cave dwellers using stick, sharp stones and fingers. Since there was no alphabet, he drew pictures. Gradually, over the years, he worked out symbols and formed

letters as alphabets to represent sounds.

3,500 B.C.

Originating from Sumeria, 'Cuneiform' means 'wedged-shaped' becuase the inscropitions were made by pressing the tirangular tip of a reed or stick in to wet clay tablets. The wedge marks were combined into signs representing objects and ideas.

2,000 B.C.

The Egyptians used a form of stylised picture writing called hieroglyphics. There were sings for objects, ideas and sounds, including a basic alphabet of 24 signs that stood for seprate letters. They used paper pen, & Ink.












500 B.C.

The ancient greek were using alphabet very much like our present einglish alphabet. The word 'alphabet' comes from the first and second greek letter 'alpha' and 'beta'. developed from the phoenician writing system, the greek alphabet added signs for vowels because the phoenician alphabet contained only consonants.






100 B.C.

Greece was conquered by the romans who took over the greek alphabet and changed the shape of letters. The Romans used square capital letters for carving stone inscriptions, and more rounded letters for writing in papyrus, wax or lead tablets and parchment.






1200 A.D.

After the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th cenutry A.D., monasteries preserved the art of writing in scriptoriums where manuscripts were copied, decorated and bound into books. A beautiful style of writing was developed in France, called 'Carolignian' scripy in honour of the Emperor Charlemagne. This was followed by the development of the 'Gothic' tyle.






1500 A.D.

A group of Italian scholars decided that Gothic was difficult to read so they developed a new script based on the earlier Carolinian hand. This style soon became popular all over Europe. Even today we still can styles like this 'Italic' because they came from Italy.






1900 A.D.
Calligraphy is the art of writing beautifully and it has often been transformed into works of art in Arabic, Chinese and Japanese cultures. Around the beginning of the 20th century a group of people in England decided to improve people's handwriting and Italic styles were revived.

Today

We write with an alphabet that's simple and scalablt, producing complex words. We write on paper, nylon, and a whole lot of myraid material including our computers.

Writing has come a long way.

So much so that, it's a though that we may be going back to the basics in using graphic to represent most of what we want to say! ~ Caveman Style ~