Chapter 1

Chapter One described how early man communicated their needs by painting pictures on their walls and how they changed from being detailed to a very simplified design over the centuries. As civilization grew, the needs to have a recording system to regulate a community also grew. Lables were made from clay and pictographs to represent the contents of a package and a decimal system based on the human hands to represent the quantity. Similar methods were used in recording many things needed to run a civilization, usually in a grid format written with a sharp pointed stylus, later replaced with a triangular tipped stylus that created a different style of writing. Most symbols used then were pictures that represented abstract ideas, but the pictures began to represent the sounds of the object instead as the need to express more and different things arose. Visual identification also became a need and was met with Mesopotamian cylinder seals, which could be rolled over a surface or stamped to claim ownership or identify the creator. Egyptian identification was derived from these people except they used carved scarab emblems. The Egyptians went through a similar pattern with their written communication. Their pictographs eventually evolved into hieroglyphics that were more simplistic in their design to write. They could be written from left to right, right to left, and horizontally or vertically. The Egyptians also developed something like paper to record on, called papyrus, made from the cyperus papyrus plant. On this, they became the first to combine pictures and words to communicate their messages.
I found the personal identification seals interesting. It's like an early logo, since these seals were used for identifying the creator of a product, or like a signature when proof was needed for the authorization of some sort of document. I also think these were interesting because the reading said that they were incapable of being forged because of the way they were designed.
Why did the design of the stylus used to write in the clay change and what exactly is cuneiform?