Chapter One - The Invention of Writing

This chapter discussed the most basic forms of communication and their evolution over time. Starting with the most basic idea of creating a verbal form of communication and then moving that to images that represent a word. For example ">D" could mean "ox", but this eventually led to complications. What if you wanted to say "dead ox"? So then combining symbols became important to make a more complex idea easy to be seen. Eventually, emotions and other concepts became important in language and drawings became words. The chapter really discussed the Anicent Egyptian form of writing, or hieroglyphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyph).

One thing I found really interesting was the evolution of tools used to write and the kinds of materals used to write on, and the evolution associated with that. Starting with clay tablets and moving through to actual paper and parchment.

My only question I have left is how many writings are there that we just can't read? Who created these writings? Then the obvious questions that we just can't answer: Why? What do they say? Can we ever figure out what they say? Why can't we?