During the first class, I was introduced to a great amount of new information. This information ranged from the first civilization to use writing for commercial purposes to how that writing has affected our world today. I plan to go into detail to reexamine all of the topics that were reviewed on January 31, 2018.
The first subject that we covered was on the topic of early cave paintings in Europe. One example that was emphasized was the cave paintings in the Cave of El Castillo. These particulars paintings had their age measured with calcite tracking and were determined to be around 5,500 years old.
Another topic that we covered was on the use of petroglyphs and how they were used in different cave paintings found around the world. However, petroglyphs were also further deciphered into further categories such as pictographs, ideographs, and phonographs. Another subject that was covered outside the cave paintings was the use of cuneiforms by the ancient Mesopotamians of Nippur, who also happened to be one of the first civilizations to keep written records of their laws, crops, and other aspects of life.
This allowed for us to transition into the subject of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which translates to “sacred carvings”. What was found was that the only ones that actually created the hieroglyphics were the scribes, which usually turned out to be the higher-class nobles or sons of the Pharaoh. These hieroglyphs were written in such a way where only nouns were used to create the story. There was also the use of hierarchal scale to show different levels of importance within different hieroglyphs by enhancing size or detail. One such example would be the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which described the story of how to navigate the Egyptian Underworld by providing descriptive hieroglyphs as well as pictographs. This would be the first occurrence in history of these two styles being used together.
As is seen here, there were many subjects that were covered during the last lesson. Those subjects ranged all the back from the time of the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians to our present day advertisements that we see on a regular basis. This goes to show how important graphics have been and currently are in our lives.
