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History of Graphic Design Typography and Printing Pre-history to 19th Century
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The Phaistos Disk, 1600 BC - Minoan Civilization, Crete A 6" diameter clay disk, found in Crete in 1903, dating from the 17th century BC. It is inscribed with an as yet undeciphered and unidentified spiraling hieroglyphic script. No others examples of the script or parallel texts have been found.
The mysterious glyphs are believed to have been impressed in wet clay using a wooden or metal punch, arranged in a spiral pattern, using 45 distinct punches for a total of 241 or 242 signs in groups divided by vertical lines. We found a variety of images and interpretive schemes for the sequence of pictograms, which have never been conclusively deciphered.
This is the earliest known example of a printed inscription -- some scholars suggest that it's an isolated work of solitary genius, a religious poem or incantation. Although theories abound, no one has definitively identified the meaning of the pictograms or confirmed its origins. Some believe that the object is of Anatolian origin, despite being found on Crete. Other theories go further afield.
The Phoenician Alphabet Notable features
The Greek Alphabet The Greeks adapted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, expanding its 22 consonant symbols to 24 (even more in some dialects), and setting apart some of the original consonant symbols to serve exclusively as vowels (see Greek Language). After about 500 bc, Greek was regularly written from left to right. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean world, giving rise to various modified forms, including the Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and Roman alphabets. Because of Roman conquests and the spread of the Latin language, that language's Roman alphabet became the basic alphabet of all the languages of Western Europe.
The Roman/Latin Alphabet The Etruscans, and later, Romans, adapted the Greek alphabet in Italy. Characters were modified or added to suit the needs of the Latins, and, given the expansionist policies of the Romans, eventually their (and our) alphabet spread throughout Europe and beyond. They added more curved strokes to their letters -- as they added curves to their architecture in the form of the arch -- and the inscriptional lettering of the 1st century AD is now considered to be the epitome of grace and proportion.
The first distinct bookhand (about the 1st century BC) is known as Capitalis Quadrata, or Square Capitals, formed with a pen nib (or flat brush) held horizontally or at a slight angle, and greedy of space.
Capitalis Rustica, or Rusticalis, is a condensed variety of Quadrata and can be written more quickly, the nib held at an oblique angle, with serifs added in imitation of those on the popular inscriptional letters, although the pen makes a heavier mark than the fine finishing strokes left by a chisel. Both forms were in use until about the fifth century AD, with Rustica being the functional book script.
Roman Uncials (Uncialis, meaning "inch") were fully developed by the fourth century (by intellectuals in North Africa) and were in use from the fifth to the eighth century as the main Christian book hand. Uncials are true pen forms, clearer than the Rusticalis and quickly written, having simple strokes and rounded shapes which seem to flow from the pen and across the page. The nib is virtually horizontal, becoming less so over time. The illustrations show that the change from a speedily-written, simplified alphabet of capitals to uncial letters was fairly natural. Here too were the beginnings of ascenders and descenders, added to differentiate between similar shapes, or sometimes from sheer exuberance.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
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Invention of
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The Alphabet
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The disc of Phaistos is the most important example of hieroglyphic inscription from Crete and was discovered in 1903 in a small room near the depositories of the "archive chamber", in the north - east apartments of the palace, together with a Linear A tablet and pottery dated to the beginning of the Neo-palatial period (1700- 1600 B.C.).
The Phoenician alphabet developed from the proto-Canaanite alphabet, which was created sometime between the 18th and 17th centuries BC. The earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician come from Byblos and date back to the 1000 BC.
It is at least 3500 years old, and it is assumed that the Greek alphabet was derived from this Phoenician alphabet, as well as the Aramaic/Hebrew, Arabic and a lot of other alphabets.
The Greek alphabet is thought to be the ancestor of all major European alphabets today. Although the script was adapted from the Semites around the tenth or ninth century B.C., it included significant improvements, which were directly responsible for its influence. Among the improvements were the transformation of certain Semitic letters into vowels, and the invention of new letters for sounds absent from Semitic languages. Originally, just like the Semitic scripts, Greek was written from right to left but following the sixth century BC, it was already written from left to right and top to bottom.
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