Prehistoric Art and Writing Hieroglyphics and Alphabet.
Printing press set the motion of Mass Communication, no longer the exclusive domain of the rich and privileged, every person now has access to books and to the power of word and ideas.
The Development Of Graphic Communication
- Prehistoric Art and Writing
- Begins more than 35,000 years ago during the Paleolithic period. Form of crude drawings and paintings made on clay.
- This period lasted about 10,000 BC.
- Most of the paintings focus on subjects such as bison, wild cattle, and goats, to finger drawings and hand imprints.
- The paintings were made by mixing readily available natural colorants such as manganese, iron oxide, charcoal and blood from animal fat or natural juices or fluids.
- The cave paintings sometimes referred as pictographs that means “writing with pictures”
- This tradition continues through Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) period, the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period as well as a Bronze and Iron Age.
- The greatest concentration of these paintings was discovered Europe and the Sahara and Libyan desserts in Africa, North and South America.
- Hieroglyphics
- Pictures and symbols represent ideas on objects and symbols in a formalized writing system.
- This term comes from the Greek “hyroglyphika grammata” which means “sacred carved letters”
- Major key to deciphering ancient Egyptians Hieroglyphics text came with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
- The stone contains a decree issued in 196 BC written in 3 languages: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Demotic (a cursive evolution of hieroglyphics text and symbols
- Hieroglyphics text are composed of ideograms – each sign or drawing represents some objects or concept that derived from the graphics.
- Alphabet
- The evolution of hieroglyphics leads to the invention of letters.
- The use of alphabetic writing began to appear in Egypt around 3000 BC.
- The Phoenicians were thought to develop the basic alphabet.
- The peoples were trading widely throughout the Middle East around 1100 BC and imported papyrus for writing.
- Greeks modified the Phoenicians alphabet system and added vowels to the alphabet and reverse the facing of some letters. (Phoenicians write from right to left and The Greeks write from left to right.
- Then the Romans took the Greek alphabet and adapted it to their own language and the remain unchanged until today.
- The development of papermaking.
- The process of papermaking is credited to a Chinese court official named Tsai Lun about 105 A.D. (The Chinese were able to keep the process of papermaking a secret more than 500 years but eventually the knowledge of the process spread by the 16th century paper mills were established throughout Europe.
- Manual Process – papermaking
- Linen and wood was reduced to a pulpy mass by suspending these ingredients in a solution of water.
- A wire mesh screen could be dipped into the pulp vat. When the screen was removed, it contains a thin layer of pulp across the screen.
- As water drain through the screen, the linen and wood fibers bonded together to form a sheet of paper.
- The sheet could then be press or dried.
(The disadvantages: slow process and restricted amount of paper available for printing.
- Mechanical Process – papermaking (Develop by Nicoles Robert 1978)
- He used an endless wire mesh screen that ran between two drive rollers.
- The screen vibrated as it moved, and was fed a mixture of watery pulp from a vat.
- The vibration of the screen help remove the excess water from the pulp and allow the water to drain through the screen.
- The pulp fibers locked together as they moved down the screen forming and endless web of paper.
- The papers were then sent through a series of rollers to establish uniform thickness and surface.
- The Printed Word
- Before the development of the printing process, only the rich could afford hand printed manuscript or hand scribed manuscripts.
- Gutenberg a Germangold invented the movable type and the printing process.
- He introduced the process of replica-casting individual pieces of type. In the replica-casting process, each letter of the alphabet is carved in a relief to form a master letter punch. This master is then used to punch into a brass mold. Type is then cast, one letter at a time in the matrix. The mold is designed to be reusable so many letters of type can be cast from the same mold, identical to the other.
- The Gutenberg Bible (42-line bible) was published around 1455. This bible more than 1300 pages long, was printed 2 pages at a time, by hand on Gutenberg first generation printing press.
