The desire of people to communicate with each other is very old. This is shown, for example, in cave paintings from the late Palaeolithic Age (40,000 BC).

Picture writing is as important as pictography. In the first advanced civilizations, writers of different nations developed the early origin of writing: Picture writing. It consisted of demonstrable symbols and numbers.

This is the earliest known font. It became acquainted with the Middle East known as Mesopotamia. -> Sumerian cuneiform writing

Due to faster writing, concrete picture writings were abstracted to characters in the time interval of 2,000 - 1,000 BC. These characters stand for words or syllables, their original shape is no longer recognizable.

An example of this would be the Babylonian cuneiform font and the Ancient Greek hieroglyphics.

Hieroglyphic characters were composed of three types of symbols:

  • Pictograms

    Stylized drawings (ideograms), which represented objects. Combinations of symbols stand for terms.

    Phonograms, which represented sounds and Determinatives that described the context of the written.

The direction of reading hieroglyphics was determined by the line of sight of figures used as symbols. Often, line of sight was from right to left.

Drawing hieroglyphics required skill and time. That's why they were developed gradually to a cursive and more fluid font. This font is called hieratical (priestly) because it was originally developed and used by priests.

From around 715 BC, an even faster-to-write font was developed - the so-called demotic font (font of the crowd). As the name suggests, this was no longer a font just for priests, but one for the people.