Media, Information and Technoculture 2000F/G Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Eric A. Havelock, Pictogram, Sumer
29 Oct 2016
School
Department
Professor
Document Summary
The pen and the sword work together over colonial rule. Pictograph script: worked best for things that were easily drawn, physical things, hard to draw ideas or thoughts, a society with pictographic struggle to use reading and writing to their fullest advantage. Corresponded to an idea or syllable: cuneiform. Ideographic and syllabic symbols: cylinders on clay. Personal stamps (signature) represented who you are: baked clay tablets. Baked so that no one could change the message: trade/commerce, time-biased medium. The clay was heavy, it was ill-suited for travel over long distance. Social/economic changes were taking place around this period that gave rise to the need to have a writing system in place. Phoenicians: 1500 bce, 22 letters, more efficient, a lot easier to learn, only consonants. Hebrew, latin, arabic, cyrillic, bengali: indo-european (romance, germanic, slavic, indonesian) Took the phoenician alphabet and added vowels: 1000-200 bce. In greek society, more and more people can read and write thanks to the alphabetic system.
