Survey 1: History of Communication: Handprints to Writing Systems

Flashcards covering the origins of art, symbols, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, alphabets, and paper media as described in the lecture notes.

BCE and CE

BCE (Before Common Era) counts backwards from 0 into the past, while CE (Common Era) counts forward from 0, providing inclusive dating alternatives to BC and AD.

Maros cave paintings

Rock paintings located on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dating back 35,000–40,000 years, recognized as some of the oldest cave art in the world.

Pictograph

An easily understandable mark or image that literally represents an object, used historically for communication and ritual purposes.

Petroglyph

A mark or symbol carved or struck into a rock surface to communicate information.

Wandjinas

Aboriginal rock paintings in northern West Australia representing spiritual figures, where Wandjina is regarded as the supreme Creator and symbol of fertility and rain.

Cuneiform

An early writing system developed by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia during the 4th century BCE, formed by pressing a chiseled reed tip into clay tablets.

Beer Ration Tablet

An ancient record keeping tablet using cuneiform symbols, where an upright jar with a pointed base represents beer and a human head eating from a bowl represents rations.

Ideograph

A symbol representing a complex idea or concept that comes to be recognized as having a specific meaning through consistent use.

The Blau Monuments

Sumerian artifacts from Mesopotamia (3300–3000 BCE) that display an early combination of images and cuneiform text, thought to record a land purchase or gift.

Code of Hammurabi

An eight-foot carved stele from 1800 BCE featuring over 300 law codes of King Hammurabi paired with imagery of the Sun God Samash to bestow godly authority.

Hieroglyphs

An Egyptian picture writing system consisting of over 700 signs, combining pictograms, ideograms, and phonograms, maintained for nearly 3,500 years.

Cartouche

An oval frame surrounding a group of Egyptian hieroglyphs, used to mark the specific names of people and places.

Rebus

Pictorial symbols that represent spoken sounds, vowels, or syllables rather than the literal objects depicted.

Cylinder seals

Engraved cylindrical objects rolled across soft clay surfaces in Mesopotamia to serve as an early form of signature or brand origin.

Phoenician Alphabet

A 22-letter alphabet developed around 1500 BCE by Phoenician traders, consisting of individual letters representing spoken sounds to efficiently record transactions.

Phoenician Bireme

An early wooden sea vessel utilizing ranks of rowers and sail power, demonstrating early principles of industrial design and multidisciplinary construction teams.

Capitalis quadrata

A stately Roman lettering style written with a flat pen nib or carved into stone featuring squared capital letters, used primarily for commemorating important events or figures.

Trajan

A Roman emperor whose military achievements were recorded on a triumphal column, and the name of a modern digital typeface based on Capitalis Monumentalis widely used in movie posters.

Capitalis Rustica

A fast, narrow, and space-efficient Roman script style used for informal writing.

Logograms

Written characters or signs that represent entire words or phrases rather than phonetic sounds, forming the structural foundation of Chinese scripts.

Chiaku-wen writing

An early form of Asian logographic writing dating from 1800 to 1200 BCE, discovered inscribed on ancient Oracle Bones.

Hanzi

One of the most widely used written languages in the world, originating in China and adapted into several other Asian writing systems.

Hiragana

A Japanese phonetic alphabet consisting of 46 characters representing consonant/vowel pairs and 5 singular vowels, used primarily for native Japanese words.

Katakana

A Japanese phonetic alphabet used primarily to write foreign loan words adopted into the language.

Space-binding media

Communication materials analyzed by Harold Innis that are lightweight and portable, helping extend political or cultural influence over large geographic distances.

Time-binding media

Durable communication materials such as stone or clay tablets that endure across extended time periods, preserving cultural continuity.

Papyrus

A light writing substrate produced from plant pulp along the Nile River delta, dried into thin sheets to accept ink without smudging.

Funerary scrolls

Egyptian papyrus scrolls (or Books of the Dead) ranging from 15 to 90 feet in length, placed in tombs to assist the deceased through the underworld.

Paper

A light material invented in China around 100 BCE using bamboo pulp dried into thin glued sheets, establishing a method that remained unchanged for nearly 2,000 years.