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We are well attached to the written word as a primary method of intercourse in our culture. Its primary elements, the characters of the modern first principle, were once quite literal tokens of occasional objects which were gradually abstracted to the earn of the rudiment. While cave paintings, dating as far back as 20,000 B.C. are the first evidence of put down pictures, true written communication is thought to corroborate been developed roughly 17,000 years later by the Summerians, around 3500 B.C. They are known to have recorded stories and preserved records using simple drawings of everyday objects, called pictograms.As civilizations fail much advanced, they experienced the need to communicate more complex concepts. well-nigh 3100 B.C., Egyptian hieroglyphics incorporated tokens meaning thoughts or ideas, called ideograms, allowing for the expression of more abstract concepts than the more literal pictograms. A symbol for an ox could mean food, for example, or the s ymbol of a setting sun combined with the symbol for a universe could communicate old age or death.By 1600 B.C., the Phoenicians had developed symbols for communicate sounds, called phonograms. For example, their symbol for ox, which they called aleph, was used to represent the utter sound A and beth, their symbol for house, represented the sound B. In addition to sounds, phonograms could also represent words. Today, our own alphabet contains many such phonograms % for percent, ? for question, and $ for dollars. It is the Phoenicians who are generally impute with developing the first true alphabet a set of symbols representing spoken sounds, that could be combined to represent spoken language. They traded with many cultures, spreading their alphabet throughout the Western world. Around 1,000 B.C., the Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks, who developed the art of handwriting in several styles. The word alphabet comes from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta.Severa l cardinal years later, the Romans used the Greek alphabet as the basis for the cap alphabet that we know today. They refined the art of handwriting, fashioning several typical styles of lettering which they used for different purposes. They scribed a rigid, formal script for pregnant manuscripts and official documents and a quicker, more informal style for letters and figure types of writing. By A.D. 100, the Romans had developed a fast growing book constancy and, as Roman handwriting continued to evolve, lower case letters and rough forms of punctuation were gradually added.