Map from tomb 3, Mawangdui, Hunan

~While Li Gonglin evoked memories of Wang Wei and Lu Hong in his painting, he also depicted himself among the specific, named sites of his own property, among those cliffs and those waterfalls, in topography rendered so convincingly and with such a...

Humans have been around for five million years. For 99.9 percent of that time, or until about five thousand years ago, they did not write at all. The invention of writing around 3000 B.C.E. transformed human society by enabling people to transmit greater quantities of knowledge more accurately across vast distances of space and time. In spite of the power of writing, however, or perhaps because of...