Download or read book Visible Language written by University of Chicago. Oriental Institute and published by Oriental Institute Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique exhibit is the result of collaborative efforts of more than twenty authors and loans from five museums. It focuses on the independent invention of writing in at least four different places in the Old world and Mesoamerica with the earliest texts of Uruk, Mesopotamia (5,300 BC) shown in the United States for the first time. Visitors to the exhibit and readers of this catalog can see and compare the parallel pathways by which writing came into being and was used by the earliest kingdoms of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and the Maya world.