Writing is the visual counterpart of speech. Marks, symbols, pictures, or letters drawn or written upon a surface or substrate become the graphic counterpart of spoken words or unspoken thoughts. The limitations of speech are the fallibility of human memory and an immediacy of expression that cannot transcend time and place. Until the present electronic age, the spoken word vanished without a trace, but the written word remained.

The invention of writing brought the lustre of civilization to people and made it possible to preserve hard-earned knowledge, experiences, and thoughts. The development of writing and visual language had its origins in simple pictures, with a close connection existing between the drawing of the pictures and the marking of writing.

Both are natural ways of communicating ideas, and primitive man used pictures as an elementary way to record and transmit information. Perhaps in the cave paintings, the pigment was smeared onto the walls with a finger, or a brush was fabricated from bristles or reeds. This was not the beginning of art as we know it; it was the drawing of visual communications because the first pictures were made for survival and were created for utilitarian and ritualistic purposes. The presence of what appear to be spear marks on the sides of some of these animal images indicates that they might have been used in magical rites designed to gain power over animals and success in the hunt. Or perhaps they were teaching aids to instruct the young on the process of hunting as a cooperative group effort. Abstract geometric signs, including dots, squares, and other configurations, are intermingled with the animals in many cave paintings. Whether they represent man-made objects or are proto-writing is not known. It will never be known with any certainty because they were made before the beginning of history, the 5,000-year period during which people have recorded in writing a chronicle of their knowledge of facts and events. The animals painted on the cayes are pictographs, elementary pictures, or sketches that represent the things depicted.