The foundations of iconography can be traced back to Ancient Egypt. At that time, people used Egyptian hieroglyphs which combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters to communicate with each other. In this blog, I want to compare the icon of nowaday application(VoiceThread) with the Egyptian hieroglyphs and see if there is any commonality between these two subjects.
As we can see on the VoiceThread, there is an eye’s icon that tells us how many people watched your video. This icon appeared in Egyptian hieroglyphs too. People in ancient Egypt use it as the meaning” see” .This discovery makes me feel excited. Our technology has improved, and culture has changed after so many years, but our ways to communicate with people still have similarities.
The other example is home iconography. We can see the difference in these home iconography is on the top part; one has the roof, the other doesn’t—the reason related to the style of the building;
In ancient Egypt, the building doesn’t have a roof, but now a lot of construction has that. It means that the improvement of society will change some iconography. This rule can be use in the future too.
Really interesting analysis! I agree with your idea: culture has changed after so many years, but our ways to communicate with people still have similarities.
Interesting analysis. Nice comparisons for the eye and the building metaphor.
I wouldn’t say that the foundations of iconography started in Egypt – icons and pictographs emerged all over the world in various cultures, many at the same time. Egyptian hieroglyphics ended up being some of the most sophisticated but not necessarily the first.