Proto-writing

thumb|upright=1.35|Sampling of US National Park Service pictograms

thumb|259x259px|Quipu in the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. Quipu ( ), also spelled khipu (, ; , ), are record-keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.

script, short strings of symbols associated with the Indus Valley Civilization

mixed ideographic/phonetic writing system for Nahuatl

thumb|300px|right|Quahog (left) and whelk (right) wampum thumb|right|A representation of the original Two Row Wampum Treaty|Two Row Wampum treaty belt thumb|Modern examples and interpretations of wampum thumb|right|Haudenosaunee wampum belt

set of symbols found upon Neolithic era (6th to 5th millennia BC) artifacts from the Vinča culture of Central Europe and Southeastern Europe

thumb|right|The Kish tablet, bearing pictographic symbols. Some of the symbols are written in a “…seemingly archaic form…” according to the CDLI entry.

archaeological artifact

wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings, discovered in Dispilio, Greece

ancient carvings on artifacts in China

Nsibidi (also known as Nsibiri, Nchibiddi or Nchibiddy) is a system of symbols or proto-writing developed by the Ejagham in the southeastern part of Nigeria and South Western part of Cameroon. They are classified as pictograms, though there have been suggestions that some are logograms or syllabograms.

pictographic writing system

one of 3 cradles of civilization thought to have developed writing independently

A veve (also spelled vèvè or vevè) is a religious symbol commonly used in different branches of Vodun throughout the African diaspora, such as Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo. The veve acts as a "beacon" for the lwa, and will serve as a lwas representation during rituals.

hypothesized writing system

Bulgarian Neolithic artefacts with incised marks

marks inscribed on Chinese Neolithic pottery

thumb|right|250px|Example of warazan at the Museum of Science, Tokyo University of Science thumb|right|250px|Instruction to use warazan to record the level of tax assessed, in the Yaeyama-jima Kuramoto Kujichō (1873 copy of the 1857 original); the fourth to sixth characters in the fifth line from the right read「わら算」(University of the Ryukyus Library) was a system of record-keeping using knotted straw at the time of the Ryūkyū Kingdom. In the Southern Ryukyuan languages of the Sakishima Islands it was known as barazan and on Okinawa Island as warazani or warazai. Formerly used in particular in

signs found on the Cascajal Block, which may represent Olmec writing

proto-writing system

Semasiography ('writing with signs', from Greek 'signification' + 'writing') is the use of symbols, called semasiographs, to "communicate information without the necessary intercession of forms of speech". This non-phonetic based technique is studied in semasiology within the field of linguistics.