Abstract
The art of communicating through pictures has worn many faces through time: pictographs on cave walls, hieroglyphics on Egyptian mausoleums, illuminations in medieval manuscripts, sketches in books, and advertisements on television. As a form of communication that has endured through time, pictures have been used to tell stories and describe important events. For example, incisions on pottery, bones, and shells, which were unearthed in Bampo, a 7,000-year-old neolithic village in Xian Province in China, have been identified as the precursor of modern Chinese script and are considered to be the oldest evidence of written language (Ho, 1976). One type of communication, the alphabet, is a relatively recent human innovation, existing for approximately 3,000 years (Huey, 1968). Yet, as modern languages were developed and enabled more sophisticated forms of communication, the picture, as one of the original forms of communication, did not fade into extinction but retained its place in history.
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Mulcahy, P., Samuels, S.J. (1987). Three Hundred Years of Illustrations in American Textbooks. In: Houghton, H.A., Willows, D.M. (eds) The Psychology of Illustration. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4706-7_1
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