A Shallow History of Humans and Communication Design
Part One: The Beginning
After much deliberation, a decision was reached to begin this article at the beginning. This image is the beginning.
This is an image of the farthest distance ever captured in outer space. Distance in space is measured in light years so the farther you look into space, you will get a glimpse of what the universe looked like at that time.
For instance, the closes star to Earth is Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is actually larger than our sun and is approximately 4.3 light years away from Earth. This means that when we look at Alpha Centauri in the night sky what we are seeing is the light form of the star from 4.3 years ago.
The galaxies pictured in image 1 are 13 billion light years away. This is the beginning of everything as we know it. When you hear the term primordial soup, what is in Image 1 are the ingredients.
Somewhere about 9 billion years later, the earth shows up. Then sometime after that humans show up. In fact, if you take the past four or five billion years the earth has been in existence and compress that time down to one year, here’s what happens:
January 1st: Our solar system and earth forms.
April 1st: The first evidence of life like single celled organisms appear on April Fools Day. Coincidence? It can’t be the first time you have heard that this whole thing could be someones idea of a joke.
April 30th: By the end of April, multi-celled organisms begin to appear but they are all just swimming around in the water.
July 2nd: This is a test of the emergency life support system. The test is stating half the year has passed and there is still no life on land.
Middle of July to November: Plants start to appear on land, fish crawl out of the ocean, mosquitos start flying, dinosaurs roam the earth, a catastrophic 100 million megaton meteor hits the Yucatan peninsula wiping out the dinosaurs.
December 31, 12:00PM: With no dinosaurs left to snack on them, mammals have taken over and the first human like form arrives.
December 31, 11:45PM: With mere minutes left to go, a Homosapien lights a fire, builds a stone wheel and kills something with a knife
Whether you believe humans were created by some otherworldly being that flicked us here with a pinky finger or humans crawled out of a swamp or a plague that rode in on a comet — you may argue that amongst yourselves at the lunch table.
Research has dated the first humans to have existed roughly 1 to 2 million years ago which brings us to:
Part Two: Humans
What set humans apart from other species occurred about 40,000 years ago. This image is from a cave in Spain called El Castillo. As you can see they may have just traced their hand on the wall but it is evidence of early creativity.
The following image is from Lascaux cave in France from about 17,000 years ago. Humans begin to create a visual language. These cave paintings move away from tracing items to representations of what they are seeing. There have been many theories as to why cavemen started painting but there is no definitive answer. The top three theories so far are:
- They felt like it. Basically theres no reason for it, like graffiti in the bathroom.
- People got high and started drawing. Possibly some sort of coming of age ritual took place and kids went into a shamanistic trance and freaked out on the wall.
- A prehistoric encyclopedia. Away of keeping a record of what was witnessed and creating a way to communicate that experience.
For the sake of this article, let’s go with theory number three. These cave paintings were a way to create a set of data, write this information down and have the ability to pass it along to another person easily and it went on like this for a while.
Part Three: Humans writing stuff in words on things.
Around 3000BC, the ancient Sumerians invented Cuneiform. The Sumerians are located in Sumer, which is located between the Tigris and the Euphrates river near the Persian Gulf.
Cuneiform uses a reed stylus to make wedge shaped indentations in wet clay tablets. Combinations of these marks represented syllables that formed words. This language was primarily used by Akkadians and Sumerians to record business transactions, ownership rights and government records. So there you have it, the decline of civilization, as soon as humans are able to write somebody is either owed something or breaking the law. This image is a Sumerian Cuneiform clay tablet detailing the annual public works for the city of Umma from 2082BC. It is not only the transactions that are of note in these tablets.
There are no longer animals running wild on a wall. Recorded transactions seem to be compartmentalized into an organized system of columns and rows. So again, as soon as humans begin writing there seems to be a very compartmentalized organizational system.
Across the Arabian desert from Sumer to Egypt, the ancient Egyptians are the next civilization to develop a writing system. Instead of using marks to symbolize syllables like the Sumerians, the Egyptians used pictorial symbols to symbolize letters, syllables and names. Heiroglyphics can be read, left or right or up or down.
From the Egyptians we also have the first appearance of images mixed with script to illustrate their story to create a larger impact. The Egyptians were very prolific in their writing. They believed it was important to record and communicate information about religion, politics and government. They inscribed their stories on walls, temples, tombs, etc. Often these large images represented kings or gods and the script told their story.
After the Egyptians wrote on all the available walls and still had more to write in order to preserve more of their legacy, the Egyptians invented papyrus so instead of stabbing a reed into clay or carving into stone, the Egyptians invented pigment and used the reed to scribe a mixture of burnt organic materials and oil to write. The Egyptian papyrus writing was a cursive form of hieroglyphics called Hieratic script.
Notice there is still the compartmental division of ideas in the hieroglyphics and the Hieratic script.
We also have basically paper and ink. The process to create the papyrus and pigments were very complex and expensive but the material is way easier to roll up, keep in storage, and archive than a rock.
To visit the next civilization to develop writing, we have to go back across the Arabian desert on the other side of the Persian Gulf and hug the shore along the Arabian sea to enter the Indus Valley.
At the same time cuneiform was in use, around 2500BC, thousands of soapstone seals from the Indus Valley have been discovered. Unfortunately, the Indus script has never been deciphered so nobody knows exactly what the seals were used for definitively. They may have been used for transactions with the script establishing quantities and ownership or possibly which animals needed to be sacrificed to please the souls of dead ancestors.
What is interesting about these seals is that there are the animals that resemble the early cave paintings combined with this far-out script that we assume is a language
These seals from the Indus Valley are another example of text and image but this seems to be the first time an image and text come together to represent a single idea in a single item.
Other cultures also developed new languages but the message is still carved into something and the ideas are still formatted in grid like rows or columns. Chinese, an extremely complex system of characters was first used about 1600BC. The Phoenician alphabet which is considered the first alphabet and very similar to Hebrew was first used about 1400BC. Arabic was first used approximately 500BC.
Part Four: Communication
By 500BC, Egypt had cornered the market and most scribes were using papyrus to write on. Around 150BC, the Pharaoh Ptolemy V of Egypt refused to sell papyrus to King Eumenes of Perganum in Turkey. It wasn’t because there was a lack of papyrus or Eumenes owed Ptolemy anything. It was because the library of Perganum was getting to be too awesome.
Which brings us to the first head to head battle!
Ptolemy was like hey buddy, screw you. Your library is getting better than Egypt’s so we are cutting off your Papyrus supply. Eumenes was like screw you Ptolemy, we’ll use parchment.
Papyrus plants only grew in Egypt so papyrus could only be manufactured in Egypt. Parchment was made from animal skin. Animals were everywhere, obviously. Preparing animal skins for writing has a very long history dating back again to Egypt. Compared to papyrus, parchment is really heavy and difficult to glue so you can’t get long scrolls like parchment.
Due to this conflict, Pergamon perfected the production of parchment. Due to the limited size and weight of parchment, pages were cut and the first books were created by King Eumenes in Turkey. Book were easier to flip back and forth and mark your spot. So parchment books are now the new trend for busy scribes.
The next major advancement in our story brings us farther east to China. In China, people has a slightly different way of going about writing. Important documents are scribed on metal, jade, bamboo, bones which were all either crazy expensive or cumbersome.
Around 150BC, a court eunuch names Cai Lun in the Eastern Han dynasty is credited with the invention of paper as well as the paper making process. The original recipe for paper was made from mulberry bark, bamboo, hemp and used fishing nets. Even though this new material was far lighter, less expensive and easier to write on than bones and bamboo, paper was not an immediate success. Legend has it that in order to impress people with the magical powers of paper, Cai Lun pretended to die, had himself buried in a coffin with a bamboo breathing tube. According to his instructions, people burned paper at his grave then he sprang up out of the ground perfectly alive.
After Cai Lun’s stunt mulberry paper gained instant popularity throughout Asia.
Around 220AD, woodblock printing is invented in China. It is mostly used for textiles because when text is involved, the characters need to be carved backwards. With this technique duplicate copies of the same document can now be made.
In 751AD, Abbasid and Tang armies battle it out in the Talas River Valley to vie for control of the Syr Darya region of Central Asia. Chinese paper-makers were captured by Arabs in the Battle of Talas. Chinese paper-makers are captured and put to work in Samarkand, Uzbekistan making the Battle of Talas, Paper Battle Round 2! The paper-making process slowly spreads through the Muslim world and reaches Europe in the 12th century.
Part 5: Printing
Moveable type is invented in China in 1040AD. The technique used porcelain tiles. Porcelain is very expensive. Ancient Chinese script contains thousands of characters that would need to be arranged by hand making the process extremely labor intensive. Moveable type in China is not all that popular.
By the 15th century, paper has made it’s way across Europe and books are being produced with various printing techniques. In 1440, Johannes Gutenburg perfects movable type with the printing press. His type is cast metal, not porcelain, and the Latin alphabet make it much easier to manage by hand. This remained the standard printing procedure for 550 years.
In order to demonstrate Gutenburgs invention… I know you really want Gutenburg to be buried alive but that didn’t happen. Gutenburg prints an affordable bible as an example of his printing press. This is the first major book printed using mass-produced movable metal type in Europe. The book is widely praised for its aesthetic and artistic qualities and immediately achieves iconic status. Other printing processes have cropped up through the years but no processes made an impact on the standard printing process more than the printing press. There’s mezzotint, aquatint, chromolithography, mimeograph, screen printing, inkjet, laser prints but all these processes are still delivering information to paper.
Then on October 29, 1969 a UCLA student named Charley Kline attempts to transmit the text “login” to a computer at Stanford over the Arpanet, a precursor to the internet. After the letters L and O were transmitted and received. The system crashed but “lo” and behold a new medium was born.
Part 6: Recap
Technology is constantly being updated but the grid format of text and images, the way our brain receives information, remains unchanged from hieroglyphics to today’s cellphones.
in 3000 BC hieroglyphics used pictorial symbols to represent a language. today we use emojis.
Heiroglyphics also paired texts with images of gods and kings. Today we have superheros in comic books!
in 2500 BC, seals from the India represented a single idea with an image. Today we have memes!
in 1440 AD, the Gutenberg bible sets the standard for printing.
Our designs for content on the internet is still based on a similar 12 column grid.
Technology is changing faster than ever and we work hard to keep up but the basic format in which we receive and process written communication has not changed all that much since humans first put a reed to a clay tablet.
