even to this day, though their original purpose and significance have been lost forever.
It is obvious that symbols have a definite purpose beyond their visual appeal and decorative function. A symbol stands for something that is out there in the world or in here in the mind. Before language was invented, people communicated their thoughts with symbols. It was the only way of communication in the ancient world, other than sounds and gestures, for language was not yet born. Whether you communicated with the dead, the nature or the people living around you, you used symbols. They were not limited to the pagan rites, however, but extended to the identity of the people that used them. Symbols fused people together, helped form societies and were expressions of loyalties to a tribe. Symbols eventually led to scripts like the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the rudiments of a language gradually took shape as people traded goods and the need to count became evident. As societies evolved symbols became more and more expressive until they stood for ideas beyond the representations of physical objects and social events. With the growth of symbols and the diversity of their usage, people came to depend on their use in almost all walks of life – rites, trade, astrology, counting – and eventually over centuries they came to stand for complex ideas that led to religion, culture, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy.
As symbols became the nucleus of daily life, our dependence on them not only grew beyond measure, but also led to both happy outcomes and undesirable consequences. As abstract representations of physical objects or natural events in the world, symbols helped us develop ideas into scientific theories, drawings into works of art and