Table of Contents: 01:02 - This one is hard  03:00 - Part I: Signification (Making Signs—and keeping them) 03:42 - What happens when we start with TEXT? 05:32 - All writing systems have some things in common: 06:33 - First: Counting Comes before Writing 07:05 - Second: Before abstract symbols come pictographs 07:43 - Egypt, Old Kingdom 2575-2551 BCE 07:46 - Second: Before abstract symbols come pictographs 07:57 - Egypt, Old Kingdom 2575-2551 BCE 08:02 - Olmec Celt(symbolizing ear of maize)10th-4th Centbury BCE 08:33 - Chinese oracle bone 1600-1064 BCE 09:21 - Compare across cultures:Pictographs become Logographs 12:22 - Which means something has gone missing… 12:38 - Representational Art emerged all over the world well before the origins of writing in Mesopotamia (3100 BCE) 13:57 - So you mean to tell me that with all these humans all over the globe figuring out how to make representational art, only the Ancient Mesopotamians (who we identify as being our root culture) were “smart” enough or “developed” enough to figure out a system of writing? 14:24 - Cuneiform was written in clay 15:43 - We now know that many forms of writing were developed on plant-based supports 16:14 - Mesoamericans used the bark of the Amate tree to write on 16:59 - Egyptians made papyrus out of layers of plant fiber from reed stems 17:44 - But Papyrus is not very durable 18:07 - In fact, the professional term for someone who reconstructs documents from fragments is “papyrologist,” even if they don’t work with papyrus. 18:25 - In China, bamboo slips were first used, but those were bulky and hard to transport. 19:17 - By ~200 BCE, the Chinese had invented paper, more or less as we know it. 19:37 - The problem with organic matter is that it decays 19:56 - By ~200 BCE, the Chinese had invented paper, more or less as we know it. 20:45 - The problem with organic matter is that it decays 21:10 - The story we tell assumes that all the evidence of written cultures that currently exists is all the evidence that there ever was. 22:49 - Part II: Materials Matter

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