VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta). On Napoleon's defeat, the stone became the property of the British under the terms of the Treaty of Alexandria (1801) along with other antiquities that the French had found. The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802, with only one break. Towards the end …

That is what this well written article on Sumerian writing and seals calls these wonderful objects, engraved with a picture story and accompanying text written with cuneiform . Their function was to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. Cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. They were used as administrative tools, as jewelery/magical amulets and also to notarize or attest to multiple impressi…

One of the best resources for finding out about these beauties is also the most obvious: Wikipedia . However the page on the Metropolitan Museum of Arts website is good also, as is the page at Stanford University . Again, wikimedia commons probably has the nicest collection of images, separated into historic categories. Amongst the many reasons that these artifacts are very appealing to graphic designers is the usage of typography in them. While …

This is a really great online exhibition, put together by Cornell University , which takes you through the history of writing based upon the materials that were used for such a purpose. The index page is built as a very simple to navigate table which takes you to all of the illustrated sub-sections which also provide short but excellent explanatory texts. Cuneiform tablets. Produced in the city-states of Ur, Erech, and Babylon. Late third and earl…