Readers tend to think of books as rectangular objects consisting of a stack of sheets of paper bound together at one edge and covered in hard boards or stiff paper, but that is only the most recent form of the book. It is a form technically called a "codex". Books took other forms before the invention of the codex. In ancient Egypt and Greece, for example, books came in the form of scrolls. Before that, they came in other forms.
Picture Writing
Quite possibly even before humans had language, people made images. Early human ancestors began drawing and painting on the walls of caves as long ago as 32, 000 years before present. It's not known for certain if these paintings were merely decoration and illustrate that humans have been driven to make art throughout our entire history, or if they represent a form of record-keeping. Some archaeologists speculate that paintings of animals on cave walls might have been a teaching tool, to show young hunters what game was good to eat and what wasn't. Others suggest that cave paintings might have been a way to record where different animals could be found, or what was the best way to hunt them. In Book, Karen Brookfield writes that these prehistoric paintings "could be a very early form of picture writing" if any of these ideas are true.
In The Book, Douglas C. McMurtrie says, "These records were commemorative, no doubt, of some notable experiences in the lives of those prehistoric peoples". It is easy to imagine an early human drawing on a smooth cave wall, making pictures of an especially good hunt for his or her descendants to see. It's even possible that some cave paintings are an early form of literature--perhaps the first comic strips or picture novels--describing the exploits of legendary figures. Petroglyphs--"stone drawings," which can include cave paintings, rock art and even tomb paintings-- "were doubtless full of meaning and told a story to the people of the time," as Edith Diehl put it in her monumental study Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique. And if they were stories or even instruction manuals, they can also be called books.
Not only are pictographs the precursors of books in the sense of records of stories fictional and factual told without words, but they are also the ancestors of writing. In a sense, pictographs are both words and the pictures that illustrate them. At various points in history in different parts of the world, pictures of things began to turn from depictions of specific items into general representations of a kind of item. For example, an early artist might have made a picture of a specific bison he had killed, but this developed into a generalized picture of any bison. Eventually, the generalized picture was understood to represent the spoken word for "bison," and pictographic writing was born. While many of the world's writing systems today don't look like pictures, some of them are clearly derived from pictographs. It is quite possible to trace Chines writing, for example, from stylized representations of objects. This development is even more apparent in ancient Egyptian writing.
Sources
Brookfield, Karen. Book. Part of the Eyewitness Books Series. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000.
Diehl, Edith. Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique. New York and Toronto: Rinehart & Company, 1946.
McMurtrie, Douglas. The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking. New York: Dorset Press, 1989.
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