Meanwhile, from about 3000BC the Egyptians were using their own form of picture writing which we know as Hieroglyphics. These were famously finally translated in 1822 with the aid of the Rosetta Stone by the French scholar Jean Francois Champollion. There are over 2000 symbols used as Hieroglyphs, and they developed along a similar path to the Sumerian script. Complex pictures first becoming stylised into pictograms of just a few lines so that a drawing was a representation of a real object. Then developing into Ideograms that widened the meaning so that an idea like time could be represented with an abstract symbol. Ideograms are still useful and widely used today to communicate meaning. The man pictured on the front of a public lavatory and road signs are common examples. These are ideal for communicating certain simple thoughts, but poor with more complex, heavily structured ones. By around 1500BC the more user-friendly idea of symbols representing sounds was developing (phonograms), and the world was set on the path to alphabets.

Image Courtesy of The National History Museum - more about the Ancient Human Occupation of Great Britain Here A group of Homo heidelbergensis on the banks of the river at Swanscombe, England, about to engage in a spot of luncheon.

The countdown to our current alphabet occurred sometime around 850BC, when the Phoenicians, living in what is now Lebanon, were using an alphabet of 24 signs that applied one symbol to one sound (rather than one symbol to one syllable as previously). The importance of this is that it made it easy to construct words. The Greeks then adopted the Phoenician alphabet (with a few changes), and then in turn the Romans adapted it. Apart from the addition of the characters J, V and W (which were originally represented by I and U) and the development of the use of lowercase letters by around the middle ages; the Roman Alphabet has been fairly unaltered since the first century AD. With its spread around Europe being aided by Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313AD.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

We are left with a series of letters that have been refined and filtered to a pure level that is somewhere between art and architecture. They are not only elegant and functional; but they are in a very real sense things of beauty upon which the fabric of our ideas is constructed. They are a gift that keeps on giving down the ages, and one of humanities crowning achievements.

Copyright - Stuart Brown