We've been on the planet Earth thousands upon thousands of years with the ability and need to communicate.  Spoken word eventually became written word, and the genealogy of letters, text, and publishing can show us how the transmission of information has shaped our lives and launched publishing history down its current path.


Using text and images dates back to our primates who painted on caves---hieroglyphs were the standard for ``writing'' for over 3,000 years during the fourth millennium BC, which marked the beginning age of writing \cite[12]{hieroglyphs}. The first systems of picture writing date back to ages ``prior even to the taming of any domestic animal, or the cultivation of cereals; earler, so far as we know, than the construction of any kind of human habitation'' \cite[17]{alphabet}.


We know there are at least five systems of ``picture writing'' that were each formed independently of one another, the Egyptian, the Cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican, and the Hittite \cite[14]{alphabet}. Through studying the history of these systems, we have seem the development of alphabets, starting from graphics that represent ideas and concepts called an ``ideogram'':


\begin{quotation}
The history of the cuneiform writing also illustrates with great completeness the successive stages through which writing tends to pass; the primitive ideograms developing themselves, through verbal phonograms, into syllabic signs, until finally the alphabetic stage is reached \cite[40]{alphabet}
\end{quotation}
This paved the way for us to have a standard for communication as a civilization---this event spawned a new conduit for ideas.

From Ideograms to the Alphabet