The Roots Of Catoptromancy in Ancient Persian and Central American Sources “ Thus television... has a prehistory in the domain of oriental folk-lore ,” wrote Berthold Laufer in 1928 in an article with the delightful title, The Prehistory of Television . Television was quite new even in the period in which Laufer was writing, but he was keen enough to see that this new technology had a long lineage in terms of an ancient human desire to see and hear at a distance. Earlier cultures displayed concepts on the idea of transmission and reception of images and sounds, that on the one hand seem rooted in pure fantasy, but on the other hand involved distinct, technological conceptualizations. As William Uricchio, a scholar in the field of media notes, it is indeed possible to “