The Invention of the Alphabet

A long time ago when the earth was green, there was more kinds of animals than you've ever seen. There were cats and rats and elephants and chimpanzees... and no one had the ability to keep track of how many of each there were, or which jars they were in. The earliest written records were made using clay tablets and pieces of reed carved to a point to scratch or carve small pictographic images into the tablets. It is believed that these may have first come about as a way of solving the problems of knowing which contents were in which sacks and pottery containers that stored food. Before alphabets were introduced, picture/image based symbols that represented animate and inanimate things were drawn to indicate information. The symbols gradually became more and more stylized until they were a very brief mark made to represent the animal or item that they represented. Alphabets evolved as attempts were made to represent sounds of speech with marks.

For this project, we were asked to make 10 shapes drawn using a single line. These marks were then repeated over and over quickly and loosely to see how the repetition "over time" could cause the mark to be stylized and possibly simplified.
Once the "evolved" shape had been determined, we were to use our new alphabet to make an "important sign". I decided to use some pretty modern materials to make my somewhat primitive sign; white reflective material for the background, and red reflective tape for the lettering. Below is a sign measuring 100 x 30 feet, and glows at night when lit by torch, flashlight, bicycle light, car headlights and so on. It advises the viewer to use caution ... just beyond the sign is the end of the earth! You wouldn't want to fall off now, would you?