Pictographic writing

Stone tablet recorded with pictographic writing from the Mesopotamian city of Kush (Irak), dated in 3500 a. C. It consists of pictograms that represent heads, feet, hands, numbers and trillos. It is preserved in the Department of Antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Great Britain.

The pictographic writing or simply pictography is a form of written communication that dates back to Neolithic times, where man used pictographs to represent objects through drawings on a slab of stone.

Stone writing is the first manifestation of graphic expression and is characterized by the fact that each sign of the graphic code is the translation of a phrase or a complete statement in the form of a non-logographic message. This type of writing is made up of pictograms, that is, figurative and realistic iconic signs that represent objects in a more or less schematic way.

In the pictography the scenes had a causative purpose, men were drawn hunting buffaloes so that the buffaloes could be hunted, in addition the symbols used were iconic (they resembled what they represented, a bull was a bull and not something else). Over time the pictography gave way to ideography.

The advantage of this type of communication is that people can understand each other without the need to share the same language, since pictograms do not refer to the linguistic or phonetic form of a language. However, the biggest drawback of pictographic writing is that it is not used to represent abstract notions.

One of the first uses given to pictographic writing by the Sumerians was to manage merchandise, it was about indicating how many pigs, donkeys or sacks of cereals the Sumerian temple received from a certain subject. Subsequently, the Sumerians began to write on clay plates that had wedge-shaped features, which gave way to cuneiform writing.

From pictographic writing, two fields were opened:

• In Mesopotamia the drawings of the pictograms were idealized, replacing them with various strokes that reminded the form of the initial drawing. Later the strokes were stylized and the similarity with primitive pictograms was lost.

• The Egyptians from the pictographic writing created the hieroglyphic system.

Pictograms are still used today as signs or instructions. Because of their graphic nature and quite realistic style they are widely used to indicate public restrooms or places like airports or train stations. However, even these symbols are highly specific to each culture. For example, in some cultures, men wear clothing similar to a dress, so even the toilet sign is not universal. Pictographic writing as a modernist poetic technique is attributed to Ezra Pound, although the French surrealists point out that the origins go back to the Amerindians of the Pacific Northwest who introduced this type of writing through totem poles.

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  The international standard ISO 7001: Public Information Symbols defines a standard set of pictograms. Other common sets of pictograms are those found in clothing labels or chemical labels.