GRST 321 Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas, Pictogram, Syllabary

• School: University of Calgary
• Department: Greek and Roman Studies
• Course: GRST 321
• Professor: Lesley Bolton

Document Summary

Writing: mnemonic devices (prehistoric before a written record of things, symbolic scripts (bronze age, cuneiform (mesopotamia, hieroglyphs (egypt, phonetic scripts (late bronze age/ early iron age, syllabaries, alphabets (greek and latin) Incan quipu (string with knots on them) are reminders for certain things. Numerical ones record transactions but literary ones record stories. Symbolic scripts: a script in which a picture represents a thing. Not a picture trying to represent a word: pictograms and ideograms, mesopotamian cuneiform, cunei(wedge) + forma (form, egyptian hieroglyphs, hiero (holy) + glyph (writing, carving, mesopotamia has the earliest evidence for a symbolic script. Before that we see clay tokens with no pictures on them: seem to be related to trade. Trade seems to be the initial reason people wrote things down: symbols represent the whole thing. Ideogram: this is extended from the definition of pictogram. The picture of wheat could mean food, harvest, grain. The ideas around the idea of the picture, things associated with it.