People have been painting pictures for at least 30,000 years . The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals . They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill . Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain . No one knows why they were painted there . Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals . Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures . About 5,000 years ago , the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as kind of writing . They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas , and also to represent the sounds of their language . The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet . The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture writing and pictures together . When an important person died , scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was buried . Some of these pictures are like modern comic strip stories . It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip . But , for the Egyptians , pictures still had magic power . So they did not try to make their way of writing simple . The ordinary people could not understand it . By the year 1,000 BC , people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing . The signs they used were very easy to write , and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system . This was because each sign , or letter , represented only one sound in their language . The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea , and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world . These days , we can write down a story , or record information , without using pictures . But we still need pictures of all kinds : drawing , photographs , signs and diagrams . We find them everywhere : in books and newspapers , in the street , and on the walls of the places where we live and work . Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily , and they can make a story much more interesting .