History of Art - Ancient Art

Ancient Art

Art, in the first period of history, began with the invention of writing, founded by the great civilizations of Near East: Egypt and Mesopotamia. This period also differed from others because artistic manifestations occurred in every culture of all the continents. In this period appear the first great cities in the main big rivers: Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Yellow River.

One of the great advances of this period was writing, generated primarily by the need to keep records of economical and commercial nature. The first writing code was the cuneiform script, which emerged in Mesopotamia c. 3500 BC, written on clay tablets. It was based on pictographic and ideographic elements, while later Sumerians developed syllables for writing, reflecting the phonology and syntax of the Sumerian language. In Egypt hieroglyphic writing was developed, with the first sample being the Narmer Palette (3100 BC). The Hebrew language was one the first languages to utilize the method of writing with an alphabet (Abjad, c. 1800 BC), which relates a unique symbol for each phoneme; the Greek and the Latin alphabet derive from it.