Advertising

Advertising is that portion of published information that shop owners employ to gain capital through the spread of knowledge, telling of goods and services for sale. However, in the time of the game world, before transport and communication were mechanised, means of advertising was highly limited.

The desire to broadcast ideas, however, was always there, and although early attempts at advertising were feeble, the history of folk attempts to influence buyers goes back to the beginnings of recorded history. Some of the earliest records, in fact, were advetrisements.

Ancient Beginnings

There were many notices reaching back to 3000 BC that employed scenes intended to capture the attention of citizens, to convince them of a leader's importance, or to frighten folk into obedience. The Assyrian kings portrayed battle scenes that portrayed themselves destroying their enemies, which meant to heighten the respect and awe of the people. The basic techniques of expression haven't changed; once an idea was fixed in stone or in paint, it tended to be seen by people as indisputable truth — people tend to believe anything that's written, a "magic" that early rulers enjoyed.

The earliest common advertisements were sheets of papyrus in Egypt, bearing the notice of rewards for the return of runaway slaves, seeking persons for employment and symbols employed by tradespeople to indicate the nature of their business. Babylonian merchants employed barkers to shout their wares to passersby, and in Egypt cries were employed by importers to announce the arrival of ships with new cargoes of merchandise. These techniques are still widely employed in the 17th century game world.

Ancient Athenians placed signboards outside their shop doors. Town criers in Greece were carefully selected for their ability to enunciate clearly, pleasingly, and in good Greek; these were sometimes accompanied by musicians. In Egypt, the criers often sang their announcements. The Romans whitened areas on walls and painted them inscriptions. Called "albums," or white spaces, pictured the trade of the householder. Wine shops in Greece and Rome would post living bush-branches over the door — this led to the origin of the proverb, "Good wine needs no bush," meaning that a good shop did not need to advertise. This is an early example of humour being used to promote an ideal or a good.

Early Publication Advertising

During the early Middle ages, the decline of literacy following the collapse of Rome — as well as the decline of trade — would diminish advertising for many centuries. Yet as both trade and literacy advanced during the 9th and 10th centuries, criers and shop signboards emerged. In France, wine shops would employ criers who dispensed samples in the streets. In England, signboards became a part of the national tradition.

The invention of printing in the 15th century brought into being new media for commercial expression. The earliest printed advertisements were hand bills, and announcements by guilds that were bound into books — a forerunner of catalogs. Hand bills usually reproduce the signboard by which a shop was known and marked. Below the sign might be some brief copy in script, or not, for literacy still amounted to less than 10% of the population.