The Evolution Of Trademarks - From Ancient Egypt To Modern Times

Trademarks have come a long way, from a simple mark left by an ancient artist through the centuries to a knockdown, drag-out fight between Iceland, the frozen food company, and Iceland, the literal country.

Those early craftspeople could not have predicted just how far trademarks would come, or just how many of them the average human would one day be capable of filing away inside a single media-saturated brain. It has been a long and interesting road, though, so let us wander backward along with it for a bit and marvel at how trademarks have transformed and evolved.

In the beginning

Humans have been trademarking stuff since before there was even a word for it. Two thousand years ago, Roman craftspeople left their distinctive marks on pretty much everything they made — tableware, brickwork and roof tiles, decorative vases, gravestones, lead slingshot ammunition, and even plumbing. Those early trademarks had no real legal clout, though. They were mostly just a way to claim creative ownership (bragging rights) over their work. A talented craftsperson could use the mark as a stamp of quality — if you bought a sculpture with the mark of Theophilus, you knew the work was as made-to-last as that giant imperial statue in the city center bearing the same mark.

The Romans were not the only ones doing this. Ancient trademarks can be found on Egyptian and Chinese objects, too, and the Lascaux cave paintings — which predate the Roman empire by around 15,000 years — seem to show that people were using personal marks to claim ownership of livestock long before such a thing became standard practice for craftspeople.

Prehistoric paintings depicted large wild animals and traces of human hands that some believe to be a form of personal claim over a livestock.

Because medieval bread fraud was a thing

We tend to think of trademark law as being a relatively recent development. After all, 800 years ago, people were not walking around wearing branded t-shirts without it actually dawning on them that they had paid for the privilege of being free advertising, so it is not like branding was a major commercial force or anything. That is not to say that trademark infringement never happened, but there were not any laws governing the use and misuse of a trademark, so if you wanted to sell inferior goods with a hijacked mark, the owner of that mark could not turn to the courts for help in attaining justice.

That did change, though, and it did not take as long as you...