What a graphic is
The word comes from Greek graphikos, which had to do with drawing, painting, and writing. In ordinary speech a graphic is a visual image or a design on some surface. A wall will do. So will a canvas, a screen, a sheet of paper, or a piece of stone. The picture is there to inform, to illustrate, or to entertain, and plenty of pictures try for more than one of those.
More than a painting
Current usage is wider than fine art. A graphic can be a pictorial stand-in for data, the sort of thing used in design and manufacture, in typesetting and the graphic arts, and in software made for teaching or for play. Images generated by a computer are called computer graphics. That is a subject of its own. The older word still covers the lot.
The examples are familiar once they are listed. Photographs. Drawings. Line art. A graph of a mathematical function, and the line graph in a report. Charts, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings. A graphic often mixes text, illustration, and colour. It does not have to.
Graphic design may be nothing but type, chosen and arranged on purpose: a brochure, a flyer, a poster, a website, a book with no picture anywhere in it. The aim might be clarity. It might be a link to some other cultural habit, so that the page feels as if it belongs with something the reader already knows. Or the aim is simply a style you can recognise later, on a different job.
Record, or interpretation
A graphic can be functional or artistic. The artistic kind may be a record, as a photograph is a record, or an interpretation. A scientist reading a measurement will strip the picture down to the features that matter. An artist may do the opposite and invent. At that point the line between a record and an imaginary graphic gets hard to see. Graphics are also used in architecture, where a drawing is both a picture and a set of instructions. Miss a line and the building is wrong.
In art the word is often reserved for work in a single tone, built from lines, as distinct from painting. That narrower sense is worth keeping. A painted surface and a printed line are relatives. They are not the same job.
The oldest pictures
The oldest graphics known from prehistoric study are cave paintings, and marks cut into boulders, bone, ivory, and antler. They were made in the Upper Palaeolithic, from about 40,000 to 10,000 B.C., and some are older still. Many of them record astronomical, seasonal, and chronological details. They are pictures. They are also notes.
Closer to written history, some of the earliest drawings the modern world still has are about 6,000 years old: engraved stone tablets and ceramic cylinder seals. They mark the start of record-keeping for accounts and inventory. Someone needed to know what had been stored, and a picture, or a mark that behaved like a picture, was the method.
Egyptian records are older than those tablets. The Egyptians used papyrus to plan the building of pyramids, and they also worked on slabs of limestone and on wood. A plan on papyrus is already a graphic in the full sense: a reduced picture of a thing that does not exist yet, made so that other people can build it.
From 600 to 250 B.C. the Greeks took geometry a long way. They used graphics to set out mathematical ideas, among them the circle theorems and the Pythagorean theorem. A diagram there is not decoration stuck beside a proof. The diagram is part of the reasoning. That habit never really stopped. A chart in a report is doing a cousin of the same work.