| ▲ | OskarS 3 days ago | |
No. Linguists make a distinction between "writing" and "proto-writing". Generally speaking, proto-writing involves using abstract symbols for some particular use case, historically it was common for accounting. You draw a sheep and put five tally marks next to it to indicate you have five sheep, that kind of thing. Proto-writing is considerably older than true writing, among the earliest widely known examples would be clay tokens known as "bulla" [1] from at least 8000 BCE Proto-writing can be very complex (I remember reading a book where a linguist calls mathematical notation "proto-writing"), but it's not "true writing" until it's capable of communicating essentially any idea you can express in spoken language (it's hard to write "I miss my cat Whiskers" in mathematical symbols) in at least a partly phonetic way (all true writing languages are phonetic to some extent). The earliest examples of that is Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000 BCE. Whatever this discovery is, it's not true writing. | ||