The communicative artworks of past cultures where people lived in intense contact with stone, taking the form of rock paintings and engravings, hint to a continuity between art and written language. Rock art functioned to retain oral stories and illustrate them, but without the inhabitants of the stone, the stories cannot be reliably interpreted. Great imagination is required.

Written language however emerged instead out of bureaucratic creativity. “It is one of the few examples of significant innovation issuing from bureaucratic organisation.” Rondo Cameron and Larry Neal “A Concise Economic History of the World“ OUP 2003.

In Mesopotamian civilisation, written language emerged as cuneiform to record the payment of tribute to the priests who organised agricultural production. Later writing spread to Egypt where the symbols took the form of artistic characters. These hieroglyphics aimed to convey their meaning more graphically than did the strokes of cuneiform, but artistic beauty gradually faded away, with writing reverting to more functional abstract symbols. Art continued to develop as a separate specialisation for communication of another type. It became a means to render things visible. “Art does not reproduce the visible. It renders visible.” (Paul Klee)