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The ancient Sumerians developed the earliest form of writing called ________ using pictographs and symbols created with a reed stylus pressed into clay
cuneiform
Alexander the Great expanded Greek culture after conquering Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. Reading and writing had become important because:
-an oral culture couldn't contain and document knowledge and information -military armies used writing as an information and communication tool -there was a rise in demand for works of Greek literature and poetry
The Mughals (also Moguls — Muslims from Mongol, Turkey and Persia) brought Persian artists to India to teach the art of Islamic illumination. Richly illustrated manuscripts such as the Padishanamah, which tells the story of emperor Shah Jahan, combined text and traditional Persian paintings that included _________.
-birds, animals, and human figures -native architecture and decorative patterns -schematic stylizations of plants
Many different Chinese writing styles were unified under the powerful emperor Shihuangdi. His prime minister Li Si designed the new writing style called hasio chuan, or "small-seal" style. Though the emperor's rule was brutal, how did this benefit China?
-unified the Chinese into one nation -weights, measures, and laws became standards -eliminated political dissent and other viewpoints
It is not known precisely when or where Homo sapiens, our modern species of the lineage of conscious, thinking people, merged. It is believed that we evolved from a species that lived in the southern part of:
Africa
The final step in the evolution of the Chinese writing is chen-shu (also kai-shu, or "regular" style). The painting ________ shows how vividly descriptive strokes with the bamboo brush join calligraphy and painting, poem and illustration, into unified communication
Album of Eight Leaves
The ______ may be the oldest extant artifact combining words and pictures on one surface
Blau monument
In the early 1400s, the___________, a private devotional text that contained religious texts, prayers, and calendar days of the important saints, became Europe's most popular book
Book of Hours
The Egyptians were the first people to produce illustrated manuscripts in which words AND pictures were combined to communicate information. A preoccupation with death and a strong belief in the afterlife compelled the Egyptians to evolve a complex mythology about the journey into the afterlife. Scribes and artists were commissioned to prepare funerary papyri for the deceased later known as the:
Book of the Dead
Chinese legend says that _________ was inspired to invent Chinese writing by the claw marks of birds and footprints of animals. Life ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, he made pictures of things in nature that were highly stylized and composed of a minimum number of lines. The Chinese sacrificed the realism found in hieroglyphs for more abstract designs
Cangjie
Charlemagne, King of the Franks, united central Europe during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, fostering a revival of learning and the arts. He standardized book design and mandated a redesign of the alphabet with the use of four guidelines, ascenders, and descenders (Celtic innovations). ____________ became the forerunner of our contemporary lowercase alphabet.
Carolingian miniscules
Ireland was a remote island relatively isolated from European invasions. By the 5th century, the ________ converted to Christianity and book design flourished in a craft tradition of abstract geometric patterns and illustrations that melded pagan culture with religion.
Celtics
Hangul was introduced by Korean monarch Sejong in 1446 CE, to put literacy within grasp of ordinary citizens who found the _________ writing system too difficult to master
Chinese
The Aramaic alphabet evolved from the North Semitic (Phoenician) script and is the predecessor of hundreds of scripts. Three of these modern scripts are still used today. Which is *NOT* from Aramaic? -Hebrew -Chinese -Sanskrit -Arabic
Chinese
During the 8th century, Chinese culture and the Buddhist religion spread to Japan where the empress Shotoku decreed one million copies of Buddhist ________ (charms) be printed and placed inside miniature pagodas and distributed - presumably to lengthen her life and ensure entrance to paradise
Dharani
The oldest surviving printed manuscript is the _________. It consists of seven sheets of paper pasted together in a scroll. Six sheets of text convey Buddha's teachings; the seventh is a complex linear woodcut of the Buddha and his disciples
Diamond Sutra
The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the ancient ________, a people whose civilization on the Italian peninsula reached its height during the sixth century, BCE
Etruscans
The Japanese had no writing system until the adoption of Chinese writing from about the 5th century on. Though the languages are spoken different, much of Chinese writing can be read and understood by Japanese. Since the Han Dynasty, the meanings of some kanji words have changed in modern Chinese. Today, Japanese writing uses a combination of kanji, phonetic characters, and logograms for foreign words. What does the Japanese term "kanji" mean literally?
Han (ancient Chinese) characters
Korean monarch Sejong developed Hangual in 1446 to overcome the great difficulty in learning the Chinese writing system. It was designed scientifically to signify the structure of the mouth and position of the tongue when speaking Korean. Why is this significant?
It is the only Asian alphabet
By the 1st century, CE, Rome began to experience hostilities from the Barbarians to the north, and from the Huns to the east. The Roman Empire ultimately fell in 476 CE, but by this time the _______ became the design form for visible languages in the Western world
Latin alphabet
In the early fifteenth century, a French nobleman hired the Limbourg brothers to establish his own private scriptorium at his castle in central France. Their masterpiece, ___________________(Book of Hours), was a pictorial book which included an illustrated calendar depicting the seasonal activities of each month crowned with graphic astronomical charts
Les tres riches heures de Duc de Berry
In the 10th or 11th century, stitched books were developed: two pages of text were printed from one block; the sheet was folded down the middle, then the sheets were gathered and sewn to made a codex-style book. The ____________ was an illustrated book on Chinese herbal medicine that was printed in this manner
Pen ts'ao
Unearthed in Crete in 1908, the _______ contains pictographic, and what appear to be alphabetic, forms imprinted on both sides in spiral bands
Phaistos Disk
Three of the following modern alphabets are still in use today. Which one does not belong? -Latin -Arabic -Cyrillic -Phoenician
Phoenician
The North Semitic people helped establish the alphabet thanks to the _________: seafaring merchants whose ships linked settlements throughout the Mediterranean region
Phoenicians
Richly illuminated and hand-lettered, figurative illustrations were not used in sacred Islamic texts such as _________ because of deeply held religious opposition to the representations of living things
Qur'an
Early humans ceased nomadic wanderings and established a village society, ushering in an era or durable tools and weapons; followed by the invention of the wheel. Shortly before 3000 BCE, the _______ settled in Mesopotamia and developed a pictographic language to record inventories of grain and animals
Sumerians
littera moderna
Textura style
Cuneiform was complex and required knowledge of hundreds of signs and symbols, whereas hieroglyphs formed ___________: a set of 20-30 signs representing sounds of a spoken language
an alphabet
The stele of Hammurabi depicts a carved stone relief of King Hammurabi who reigned from 1792-1750 BCE. Written in careful cuneiform, the text has:
a code of laws and consequences for violating them
Hangul's 14 consonants are represented by _________
abstract depictions of position of the mouth/tongue when they are spoken
Egyptians used the Demotic script, _______ based on hieroglyphics, for secular uses such as commercials and legal writing. The word "demotic" comes from the Greek word for "popular"
an abstract style of handwriting
The chop is a traditional Chinese identification stamp made by carving calligraphic characters into a flat surface of jade, silver, gold, or ivory and imprinted on paper in black or red ink. The stamp became the fundamental technique that led to the development of ___________
block printing
The earliest Chinese writing is called chiaku-wen, or _________. It was incised on tortoise shells and the flat shoulder bones of large animals, called oracle bones, and closely bound to the art of divination: to foretell the future by communication with gods or dead ancestors
bone-and-shell script
The earliest form of Chinese writing was made up of pictographs carved on oracle ___________ used to foretell the future
bones and tortoise shells
The codex was the term used to identify the first ________
book format
The next phase of Chinese calligraphy was chin-wen, or _________, which consisted of inscriptions on cast-bronze objects including food vessels, musical instruments, weapons, coins, and seals. Messages were inscribed in the casting molds to preserve answered received from gods and ancestors, and it was also used for treaties, laws, and contracts
bronze script
Rome took great pride in its imperial accomplishments and conquests, and created monumental letterforms for architectural inscriptions to celebrate military leaders and their victories. The simple geometric lines of the ___________ later influcenced the roman typography of the Renaissance era
capitalis monumentalis
The Roman written hand took several forms. The most important was the __________ (square capitals) which was written carefully and slowly with a flat pen in stately proportions and clear legibility. There were no spaces between words. Serifs were added with the pen
capitalis quadrata
_________, as seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, were so named because their full pages of densely packed designs had the intricate patterning associated with oriental carpets.
carpet pages
Two natural byproducts of the rise of village culture were the ownership of property and the specialization of trades or crafts. Both made visual identification necessary. Proprietary marks and _______ were first developed so that ownership could be established
cattle brands
The Vatican Vergil, the earliest surviving illustrated manuscript, is an example of the ________________. Created in late 300-400 CE, its illustrations combine roman rustic capitals (capitalis rustica) with echoes of the rich colors and illusionist space of the wall frescoes of Pompeii, so similar to late Roman painting.
classical style
The _________ came to be used increasingly in Rome and Greece about the time of Christ. The durability and permanence of this book format appealed to Christians because their writings were considered sacred and it was used to distance themselves from pagan formats
codex
For nearly fifteen centuries, people looked with fascination upon Egyptian hieroglyphics without understanding their meaning. The last people to use this language were the 4th century Egyptian temple priests. In 1799, Napoleon's troops unearthed a black slab near the Egyptian town of Rosetta inscribed in two languages and three scripts. All but one of the scripts listed below is on the Rosetta Stone. Which one does *NOT* belong? -hieroglyphic -Greek -Demotic -cuneiform
cuneiform
This writing system evolved into _____, a series of wedge-shaped strokes pressed into clay with a stylus. Pictures of objects became signs or ideographs representing abstract ideas and sounds of spoken words
cuneiform
In Mesopotamia, _______ provided a forgery-proof method for sealing documents and proving their authenticity. When they were rolled across a damp clay tablet, a raised impression of the depressed design became a "trademark" for the owner
cylinder seals
The Sumerians created cattle brands and _________ to identify ownership of property
cylinder seals
Over the centuries, Islamic manuscript decoration became increasingly elaborate, with intricate geometric and arabesque designs filling the pages of the Qur'an. ____________ were NOT used because Islam held religious opposition to images of living creatures.
figurative illustrations
Carolingian miniscules
forerunner of contemporary lowercase alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the ancient Greeks who applied __________ to the uneven Phoenicians characters, converting them into art forms of great harmony and beauty. Many letterforms, including E and M are based on a square. The A is constructed from an equilateral triangle, and the design of the O is a near perfect circle
geometric structure and order
Between the 3rd and 6th centuries, Celtic scribes began to letter ________________, using four guidelines with vertical strokes that extended above and below the two main lines called ascenders and descenders.
half uncials
Unlike the Sumerians, whose pictographic writing evolved into abstract cuneiform, Egyptians retained their picture writing system, called _______ (Greek for "sacred carving" after the Egyptian for "the god's words")
hieroglyphics
Abstract geometric signs, including dots, squares and other configurations are intermingled with the animals in many cave paintings and petroglyphs. The symbols may represent ideas or concepts known as:
ideographs
The vibrant luminosity of gold leaf, as it is reflected light from the pages of handwritten books, gives the sensation of being literally illuminated; thus, this dazzling effect gave birth to the term:
illuminated manuscripts
Another theory about the origins of printing focuses on the practice of making _________ from inscriptions carved in stone
inked rubbings
Of the numerous inventions in Sumer that launched people onto the path of civilization, the __________ was perhaps the most significant. Mesopotamians organized libraries with thousands of tablets about religion, mathematics, history, law, medicine, and astronomy
invention of writing
In the 4th century, BCE, Alexander the Great expanded Greek culture throughout the ancient world, including Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. Alexander formed _______ to contain and document the hard-won knowledge that would otherwise have been lost from an oral culture
libraries
Chinese calligraphic writing consists of ________, graphic signs that represent an entire word. There is not direct relationship between the spoken and written Chinese languages. Written Chinese was never broken down into syllabic or alphabetic signs for elementary sounds
logograms
The Chinese calligraphic writing system consists of 44,000 characters which can be combined to make over 80,000 _________, graphic signs that represent and entire word
logographs
During the early Christian era, nearly all books were created in the _____________, or writing room, headed by the scrittori, a well-educated scholar who understood Greek and Latin and functioned as both an editor and art director. Scribes spent their days in isolation, bent over a writing table penning page after page in a trained lettering style.
monastic scriptorium
When making a woodblock print in China, the wood around each character is painstakingly cut away. Around AD 1045, the Chinese alchemist Pi Sheng extended this process by developing the concept of __________, an innovative printing process that was never widely used in Asia because the sheer number of characters made the process too tedious
movable type
Illuminated manuscripts date back to the age of antiquity. In addition to religious books, monastic scribes preserved manuscripts of classical Greek and Roman literature, and also transcribed their sacred songs. __________ is one of the greatest contributions of medieval graphic design
musical notation (sheet music)
Cai Lun, a high government official, is credited with the invention of _________ in 105 CE. His process for making writing substrates from natural fibers continued almost unchanged until Industrial Age manufacturing
paper
China became the first society in which ordinary people were in daily contact with printed images. In addition to block prints of religious images and texts, ________ began to be designed and printed around 1000 CE due to a shortage of metal currency
paper money
The development of _________, a paper like substrate for manuscripts, was a major step forward in Egyptian visual communications
papyrus
King Eumenes II of Pergamum (ancient Greece, now part of Turkey) developed the process of making _______ to overcome an embargo on papyrus place by Egyptian King Ptolemy V during a fierce rivalry where both sought to influence their command of knowledge and literature through vast libraries each had created
parchment
Throughout the world, from Africa to North America to the islands of New Zealand, prehistoric people left numerous __________, which are carved or scratched signs or simple figures on rocks.
petroglyphs
The animals painted on the Lascaux caves date back to 15,000 years BCE. These early pictures depicted scenes of survival and rituals relating to hunting. The animals painted in the caves are ___________, elementary pictures or sketches that represent the things depicted.
pictographs
Another early form of Chinese graphic design and printing was ____________. These "sheet dice" were first printed on heavy paper cards at about the time paged books were replacing manuscript scrolls
playing cards
The major deciphering of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs was done by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822. He discovered that the hieroglyphs often functions as phonograms and not simply pictographs, allowing him to sound out written words. When the early Egyptian scribes were confronted with the words too difficult to express in visual form, they devised a ________ using pictures for sounds to write the desired word
rebus
The development of visible language had its earliest origins in:
simple pictures
Early visual language systems were complex and required knowledge of hundreds of signs and symbols, whereas an alphabet, a set of visual symbols or characters that represent the elementary ______ of a spoken language, require only 20 or 30 easily learned signs
sounds
The Hangul writing system - the Korean alphabet - is one of the most scientific ever invented. It consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels that combine alphabet characters into blocks that correspond to ______ in the Korean language
spoken syllables
Many of the Moorish-influenced manuscripts from Spain, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Beatus of Fernando and Sancha, are texts on ____________.
the Book of Revelation
The medieval era that followed the fall of the Roman Empire also gave rise to illuminated Jewish, Islamic and Persian manuscripts. Which of the following is NOT included during this period? -the Mainz Haggadah -the Diamond Sutra -the Qur'an -the Padishanamah
the Diamond Sutra
Three innovations developed by the ancient Chinese that changed the course of human events are listed below. Which does *NOT* belong? -the alphabet -paper -gunpowder -printing
the alphabet
Our use of visual symbols originated with the Egyptians. Which of the following is not an iconic Egyptian design? -the zodiac -the peace sign -the scales of justice -animals which represent concepts, cities, and people
the peace sign
The textura lettering style seen in Gothic manuscripts was composed of vertical strokes capped with pointed serifs and almost eliminated rounded strokes. Why was this dense lettering so condensed?
the save time and space
Two theories argue the origin of Roman serifs: the letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brushed marks which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs; or that serifs were devised ________
to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiseled into stone
Lettering styles evolved to become faster and easier to write. The earliest was the _________, so named because it was written between two guidelines that were one uncia apart (named for the Roman inch—but the style was actually invented by the Greeks). This style had rounded, freely drawn letters more suited to rapid writing.
uncial
Greek scribes made their pens from hard reeds cut into nibs and split at the tip to aid ink flow onto smooth sheets of vellum or parchment. These pens gave their writing style a different character than writing by Egyptian scribes, who used soft reeds to brush ink onto rough surfaces like papyrus. The Greeks developed a more rounded writing style called _______, which could be written more quickly because the rounded letters were formed with fewer strokes
uncials
A radical design innovation in Celtic manuscripts was using __________ to separate strings of letters into words allowing readers to recognize them more quickly.
word spaces
