illuminated manuscripts have historically been created

It possessed symbols that represented sounds which we now call letters. The Phoenician alphabet became many people’s alphabet. The Phoenicians (citizens of what we now call Lebanon) were the ones who coalesced many circulating ideas about writing into one alphabet with twenty-two figures.

They floated in far less delineated patterns. Neither was written left to right or up to down. In this way, hieroglyphs and petroglyphs were very different, but both existed in unfixed spatial arrangements. Pictograms were specific to each community, so a traveler from Mesoamerica wouldn’t be able to understand Egyptian tomb writings if they came across them. They were stand-ins, agreed-upon short cuts to connote an idea. These relied on symbols (as the petroglyphs did), except the symbols didn’t look like what they represented. Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs are some of the earliest pictogram systems. Next came pictograms, another language that was pre-alphabetic. Images via Werner Forman Archive/Shutterstock, Werner Forman Archive/Shutterstock, Josef Niedermeier/imageBROKER/Shutterstock, and Alfredo Dagli Orti/Shutterstock. A cave wall might hold ancient petroglyphs of a sun, wavy water lines, the outline of an animal. While these were stylized in each culture, their symbols were mostly universal. Petroglyphs are representative drawings that are easily accessible without the need for written language. Humans have communicated through written symbols for thousands of years, long before we had anything resembling an alphabet.Īmong the oldest forms of written communications are petroglyphs, images painted onto rock walls. Here’s a look into how they’ve transformed the written word. Alphabets developed in response to the needs and tools of society, and they continue to evolve.

Illuminated manuscripts have historically been created