Message in a bottle

Text has become an integrated part of our everyday life. We don't even think about it. It is unthinkable to not have text to our disposition. Though, there was a time, actually not that far back in time, that we didn't have the letters needed to make the words. Still, we did communicate back then as well (I guess it is much more accurate to say that we've had the letters and alphabets for a long time, but the numbers of people that could actually use them has been very small, so there has been a great need for other ways to communicate with all of those that couldn't read as well) , mostly through the spoken word, but also through the use of pictures. These pictures were supposed to convey a message or story by 'reading' the image. This is the case with a lot of religious images, all the way up to our time, but has a long tradition that goes thousands of years back. I guess one can say that it goes all the way back to some of the first paintings ever made (or at least found) for example in the caves of Lascaux, France. These are dated to be from 32.000 BC. Exactly what sort of purpose these images had is not known. But if we look at, for example, Egypt and how they were writing their stories, it is clear that they had gone through a process from images (pictograms) to symbols/letters (hieroglyphs). As far as I understand it, our alphabet is based on the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and for example the letter A is derived from the (pictogram/hieroglyph of the) head of an ox (Aleph).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph