proto-writing
Sign in to savethumb|right|The Kish tablet, bearing pictographic symbols. Some of the symbols are written in a “…seemingly archaic form…” according to the CDLI entry.
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Encyclopedic overview
15 sectionsContents
- Paleolithic
- Neolithic
- Neolithic China
- Neolithic Southeastern Europe
- Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age
- Mesopotamia
- Egypt
- Bronze Age
- Indian Bronze Age
- European Bronze Age
- Later proto-writing
- African Iron Age
- See also
- References
- Sources
thumb|right|The Kish tablet, bearing pictographic symbols. Some of the symbols are written in a “…seemingly archaic form…” according to the CDLI entry.
Proto-writing consists of visible marks communicating limited information. Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in China and southeastern Europe. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to true writing systems, which record the language of the writer.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “proto-writing” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.