After Class: Day Two 2/6/09

1. Name of graphic style (or topic) studied this session: Today's class discussion was on Chapter 1: The Invention of Writing. We talked about early writings, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. The main topic was on pictographs and the progression of them to other forms of writing such as: petroglyphs, cuneiform, and hieroglyphs.

2. Describe specific qualities of this style (or if it’s a topic-highlights of that topic) that will help you identify it in the future. Elementary style drawings = pictographs, turned on their side then sketched very quickly (dashes) = cuneiform, Egyptian combination of pictures and words to communicate = hieroglyphics

3. What is the most useful or meaningful thing you learned today?
 Understanding how cuneiform came to be; people wanted to speed up the writing process and made the symbols/pictographs less complex.

4. State at least one question you have after the class. (if you state none here, you’d better have more detail done above to offset the work.) Why would they turn the symbol/pictograph on it's side? How did the demotic form come to be?