Pictographs Writing/visual equivalent to speech/sound, written symbols, letters are graphic in nature. Prehistoric paintings were disorganized, shifted in scale and did not account for time. Utilitarian in nature. Pictographs are generally severely abstracted symbols which represent what they depict. Ideas are also translated into pictographs (ideagraphs). For brevity, over millennia, pictographs were reduced to the minimum number of strokes and elements required to retain the message (protoletters). Rebus writing and phonograms developed to visually describe things not easily represented by pictographs (adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, personal names, etc). By 400 bc, the Egyptians had developed "mature" hieroglyphs supplemented by demotic, secular language. Cunieform had few curved strokes, some were angled, most were oriented horizontally or vertically and at perpendicular angles to each other.
