Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

Abstract: Sub Saharan Africa (“Black Africa”) did not develop its own writing system. This is why it did not develop its own advanced civilization… as, say, the Maya. But then Africa had steel, an important military edge (which the Maya and other Americans did not have). What is going on is the nature of the lay of the land. Advanced civilizations evolved where the land was favorable to empire building, which, in turn, was facilitated by writing. Writing is a mental help in many ways and enables to transmit orders, literally, far away.

Now empires tend to evolve in favorable highlands, temperate climates, or places where communications (steppe, desert, fluvial or maritime) were easier. Hence the Roman “Mare Nostrum”, with the Greeks all around the Mediterranean, like frogs around a pound, and the Chinese Grand Canal, or the giant Mongolian empires… The lay of the land in Black Africa did not facilitate the creation of empires and thus did not encourage writing.. What can one write on when it’s too hot and humid, anyway?

Historiographical civilization is around 51 centuries old (we culturally descend from Sumer to some crucial extent). Writing had 51 centuries to influence mindsets (of the elites) where it became the dominant influence. That the civilizational writing mindset is not as old in Sub Saharan Africa as in the Americas or Eurasia can be turned into a strength. It is not just a weakness.. It is nothing to be ashamed of, and fiercely denied… but an advantage and weakness to be understood. (I am proud to be able to turn into a deeply African savage, overriding Euroasiatic and American norms, as needed by the circumstances…)

As the fate of the Greco-Roman civilization showed, civilization, ravaged by a controlling plutocratic elite, like an apple by a worm, can internally devolve into barbary. Thanks to Weapons of Mass Destruction and modern entangled economies, that devolution can happen extremely fast as the grotesque invasion of Ukraine showed… And that’s a warning for all of Africa.

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Why are some societies powerful and other societies weak?

This is a question about Africa, but it underlays a more general question: what makes some societies more powerful than others? The answer is simple. Power means, first of all, in the fullness of time, mental power. Nazism and Stalinism failed first of all because they had little mental power, they were idiotic (meditate this, Xi!)

In Africa, the mental power was so weak, that few societies graduated from the tribal stage to the national stage. Africans had to wait for the so-called “colonizers” to make nations for them. (Moroco, Egypt, and Nubia are counter-examples, to some extent… Ethiopia is the only African country which really made a nation… Although of course many Ethiopians will disagree as the country was ravaged by various civil wars in the last few decades…)

Africa is failing in more ways than one. It’s not just the GDP per capita which goes down while the terror goes up. What is increasingly thriving is an industry of exculpatory explanations to justify present dictatorships with allegations of abuse at the hands of civilization… centuries ago.

The Algerian military dictatorship, in power since an ill-devised accord of Evian in 1962, is ridiculing itself, and slowly making the French regime realize that there is a serious problem with Algeria (France itself seems to be sliding towrd dictatorship, by the same phenomenon of cultural osmosis that I am warning against!)

But it is not of North Africa that we will speak here: North Africa has been a center of high literate civilization for more than three millennia. The problems of North Africa are easy to fix, and were fixed in the past, before a relapse into rejection of civilizing democracy, Islamism and exploitation by extracting (literally and figuratively) elites. The real problem is Sub Saharan Africa, which has the poorest nations on Earth, many of which are heading the wrong way. Ever more. The reason I mention Algeria is that the fake excuses for dictatorship used by the Algerian tyrants are now used all over… As I said cultural osmosis is at work.

The new young and wealthy Senegalese president, keen to throw anything French out, officially has several wives in 2025 whom he proudly exhibits… A first for Senegal, historically the oldest independent democracy in Africa…. It’s hard to reconcile democracy, one person, one vote, with the idea that powerful men can have several wives simultaneously. Now harems are flaunted again, as in old times…

But actually it’s way worse than just having Africa failing. What has failed is the explanations of why Africa failed in the Middle Ages. Sorry, but accusing an illusionary “colonialism” which happened centuries later, doesn’t work. Moreover, anyone who has lived in Black Africa, as yours truly, who grew up there, knows all too well, “colonialism” did not work there, because of the climate. Sub Saharan Africa is not Kenya or South Africa (both have variants of temperate climates, due to altitude or latitude, or both). Paradoxically, Africa got exploited MUCH more AFTER independence than it was before (when French colonies were rather administered protectorates… Belgium was another story… And so were Portuguese colonies…): see my observations, lower down, about the ultra wealthy French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, an exploiter of beautiful language and even more of beautiful African forests …

Historically, the present weakness of Africa is not a question of military power: it is well-known that Africans and Arabs invaded Spain in 711 CE… But that was strictly an Arab and North African adventure. However later, in the Eleventh Century, Africans, the strict Suni Almoravid “Berbers”, invaded Spain. They came fundamentally from West Africa, Senegal (Takrur, Gudala) and up. Representations show some of them with charcoal black skins. The Almoravids failed quickly, because, differently from the Mongols, they failed to integrate civilization in their mindset.

Africa had endogenous steel, a completely non-obvious tech (one needs to use forced air to melt iron)… so Africa couldn’t be conquered easily like the Aztecs (I have seen African hunters training in Guinea Bissau, using native arrows with steel arrowheads… Very powerful, indeed…)… Dahomey quickly copied British guns, inflicting a surprise defeat on the Brits. 

Africa was so well defended that much was conquered by Africans themselves, under light touch colonial supervision. Senegal was conquered by the Natives, under French very light administrative touch (light relative to the usual ways and means). 10 French officers, 5,000 Senegalese troops.

The unsaid truth is that exporting slaves helped Africa and was more humane than the alternative. As it is, Africa is going towards two billion people… But if one billion of those two billions die in wars pretty soon, I would not be surprised.

And the question remains: why did Africa fail? Say, not to speak of Europe and her colonies, why did Africa fail, relative to China? Or India? Actually which countries did not succeed? Basically Australia and Subsaharan Africa. Now Australia was isolated on the other side of the Wallace Line, and one could argue was a victim of the TASMANIAN EFFECT writ large. But Africa, even Subsaharan Africa was NOT isolated: Senegal had trade with Carthage, and as the Almoravids showed, West Africans could end up ruling Spain if they really tried.  I know that in the desert, one can stand on a desertic, majestic mountain and see an oasis from 100 kilometers away… and, if one knows where the water wells and the oases are, one can cross the Sahara fast, south to north. Now, yes, the Almoravids were Muslims (most of Islam is an obstacle to cognition)…

Although warriors and desert raiders (Muhammad style, PBUH!) could cross the desert, more gentel and intellectual types would have not done so. Thus Sub Saharan Africa was isolated from the entangled web of civilization of the Middle Earth.

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Does Civilization Need an Empire?

I just mentioned the Almoravids’ amazing conquest… But most of Senegal is Sahel, and to the north, the more the desert, the easier it is to establish an empire. Ease of communications if Sahara and Sahel enabled various empires, for example the Songhai empire… Now the Songhai empire was a Muslim empire, complete with Arabic script and Sharia… So not really Sub Saharan… Yes there were professors with pensions in Timbuktu, but also, beside the flourishing slave, gold and ivory trade, there were Jews, Iralians, Moroccan and Spaniards… to grease up the whole thing.. 

The answer to the riddle of Africa’s lack of… civilization in not building a significant, high impact civilization (as, say the Maya or central Mexicans) has, at least partly, to do with the lay of the land. Africa has known empires… where the land is easier to rule: in the Sahel, the savannah park, as I just mentioned… And of course Egypt, but communications along the Nile are extremely easy, and the tremendously productive land is next to the river, and easy to control. So there was a large Egyptian empire, complete with an ideology favoring HARD POWER. Hard Power comes from having more advanced tech which ultimately rests on a better understanding of the world.

So successful empires need intelligence in action enough to provide hard power. Rome is the arch-example… The Roman alliance with Gaul came from Gaul having superior metal tech and the needed mines. So Roman legions were equipped with Gallic weapons to better beat the Gallic warriors… or at least those warriors who begged to differ with Rome, until they didn’t: Caesar put in charge of defending Provincia, when he went into Gallia Comida, forces, namely the dangerous Allobroges, which had been defeated by Rome only a decade or two prior. The Allobroges went smoothly from opposing Rome to full military cooperation (compare with the obstinate Jews in Israel who kept fighting Rome into oblivion and diaspora…) It’s not that the Allobroges were weak, just the opposite: when Hannibal had showed up, 160 years earlier, forcing his way through the Alps with 60,000 soldiers, the Allobroges had inflicted on his army enormous losses.

So why did the Aloobroges suddenly cooperated enthusiastically with Caesar? (Besides the fact Julius was defending Geneva, second city of the Allobroges.) The Allobroges were not stupid and they saw that they would profit from a symbiosis with Rome. Their mindset was adaptable. It was not all of their own making: Massalia (Marseille), an ancient Greek city-state, with its own empire, enemy of Carthage and ally to Rome, had tried to persuade its Gallic trade partners to fight Carthage. When Hannibal finally crossed the Alps, he had lost half of his army!

Ultimately Gallia saw the wisdom of a literate society, and adopted the mass literacy of the Romans: Roman legionaries were literate, and that helped them win wars… Beside having a better society where people’s lives were healthier, more comfortable, and more friendly to the rise of wisdom, let alone better laws.

SUB-SAHARAN Africa did NOT DEVELOP a WRITING system (Nsibidi, a system of symbols or proto-writing, where Roman letters can be found among hundreds of other symbols, existed in some parts of Nigeria, and appeared in the last millennium). This is remarkable as Egypt, Sumer and then the Phoenicians developed writing several millennia ago. 30 centuries ago, North Africa knew at least three different writing systems (Tifinagh, a genuine alphabet, is still in use today, from Morocco to Niger, and should be revived) . 

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Oldest Writings Systems explain why Africa was left behind:

Consider the world of writing: 

Sumerian Cuneiform (c. 3100 BCE, Mesopotamia – Modern Iraq, Kuwait) is the oldest known writing system. It enabled Sumerian cities to organize complicated governments, with bicameral systems, etc. It was written on clay tablets using a reed stylus. Clay is not an obvious material in most of Africa (but was ubiquitous in Mesopotamia, with the sun to dry the tablet).

Sumer worked in concert with Egypt, thus 51 centuries ago, to evolve from pictograms to proto-alphabet. It was a mix of logograms (words), phonetic symbols (sounds), and determinatives (context clues). It evolved into Hieratic (simplified script for priests) and later Demotic (everyday script). The Indus Script (c. 2600–1900 BCE, Indus Valley – Pakistan & India) then appeared. Still undeciphered!

 Chinese Oracle Bone Script (c. 1200 BCE, Shang Dynasty – China) is the earliest form of Chinese writing, carved on turtle shells and animal bones. It recorded imperial decisions.

This direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters helped turn China into a major scientific and technological power, independently from the rest of Eurasia.

Mesoamerican Writing Systems evolved completely independently of the rest of the world (c. 900 BCE – 100 CE, Mexico & Central America)

The Olmec Script (c. 900 BCE) is the oldest Mesoamerican writing known… in the western Mayan highlands. Still undeciphered. It was followed by the Zapotec Script (c. 500 BCE), further west, also in highlands. Found on stone carvings, used for historical records. Then the Maya appeared, by turning the entire Yucatan peninsula into a vast agricultural and hydrological system. Maya Hieroglyphs (c. 300 BCE – 1500s CE) had an advanced logographic and syllabic system, used for history, astronomy, and mythology. 

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Maya civilization was most tech and science dependent so developed full writing… But that was not enough to save it:

Maya civilization mostly collapsed in the Eight Century, from a mix of wars between cities, civil strife and collapse of the man-made vital ecology… the entire calamity brought by a multi-centenial drought greatly caused by Mayans themselves having neglected previously established Maya science. It was an admirable civilization that was extremely complex and fragile, because highly tech dependent to support an enormous population of ten million: it rested on dams, huge canals, special trees (used for hydrological constructions and irreplaceable), sacred primaval forests (keeping the whole place, Yucatan, turned into a giant garden, wet), and a balance of many city-states led by a duopoly. The entire society was held by a tight ideology and ferocious plutocracies. Drought and subsequent wars plus anti-establishment devastation brought the whole thing down in a generalized holocaust. The equatorial forest.came back quickly and what was left of the Maya population fled to the coast where, shadows of their former selves, seven centuries later, they experienced the bitter sweet spectacle of landing conquistadores… One of the Maya, the famous Malinche, translator and soon Cortez’s spouse and mother of his son, would play a crucial role in the conquest of Mesoamerica. A volcano east of Popocatepl and Puebla is now named after her (appropriately so).

Writing could have saved the Maya civilization. Indeed, four centuries before the final collapse, there was a milder version of the same situation. However, corrective measures were taken in time. If influential enough Maya elite had carefully enough studied what had happened before, and made it so that the same mistake had not been repeated, the Maya may have well survived.

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In Yucatan, the jungle seized back its rights from the garden the Maya had created. In Subsaharan Africa, that garden never happened. Mesoamerica mixes temperate highlands, which are considerable, and low lying jungles… Africa has mostly the low lying jungles, or forest gallery landscape, neither of which is propitious for empire. 

And thus Africa was not propitious for writing.

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The Roman empire rested on Roman literacy:
The organization of the Roman army is what made it win wars for 9 centuries. Legions and their auxiliaries needed elaborate logistics and Caesar was known for this (Napoleon concurred). In battle the legions’ flexibility enabled it to maneuver dexterously (that failed superbly against Hannibal and with Crassus; hence four spectacular defeats; as literacy and all of society went down after 250 CE, Roman defeats piled up, consecutive to the DICTATORIAL EFFECT). 

Common Roman soldiers (Miles Gregarius), a fortiori legionaries were expected to read orders, follow written instructions, and sign documents. Writing tablets (wax and wooden tabulae) and styluses were common. Military camps were full of graffiti. Centurions, tribunes, and senior officers needed advanced literacy for record-keeping, military reports, and correspondence. Caesar’s writings originated from military documents. Pay records, and duty rosters were all written down.

Literacy was an enormous advantage in battle. The tremendous results of the Roman military were generally caused by excellent battle tactics and, or strategy where literate intelligence made the difference.   

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Negritude is no fakitude:

So back to Africa. Arabic script was invented in… Arabia, as a derivative, like Hebrew, of Phoenician script (Europa was a Phoenician princess…). Arabic was not invented in Africa. The only genuine African script is the Ethiopian one (it’s twice older than Arabic)…. But then of course Ethiopia is not Sub Saharan and Ethiopia was part of the Middle Earth/greater Mediterranean area, complete with Egyptians, Jews and Christians.

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Circa 2010, a French president (Sarkozy) caused a scandal by saying Africa was “out of history”. Unfortunate semantics… Yet seemingly true (except for the not smallish detail of steel…) History is what caused civilization. When Andean peasants evolved potatoes, they contributed to civilization, be it only by making possible the conquest of Siberia by the Cossaks, free men mostly from Ukraine, partisans of making Russia greater again, surviving on a potato diet…

Sarkozy said at Cheikh Anta Diop University (Dakar, Senegal) on July 26, 2007:

“The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has not fully entered into history… They have never really launched themselves into the future. The African peasant, for thousands of years, has lived with the seasons, whose ideal of life is to be in harmony with nature…”

This set of assertions is disconcerting when one sees French presidents hard at work since 1980, trying to remove France from history… But let’s overlook this piece of self-examination… Sarkozy’s indecent observation about history created an enormous scandal (and I do not fully agree, as I suspect Africa may have created steel tech!)… But, the fact is, there is NO Subsaharan African historiography, because Subsaharan Africa had no writing!  

The University of Dakar (as it used to be called!) is now named “Cheikh Anta Diop University” according to a professor whose claim to fame is the pretension of having proven that Egyptians were Black Africans, Subsaharan Africans! That allows him to prove that Sub Saharan Africa, being actually Egypt, was thus literate. In other words, Diop was a total lunatic.We know exactly how Egyptians looked and their genetic make-up. They were not, they are not Black Africans. I have had close friends who were Senegalese and others who were Egyptians… Egyptian phenotype is closer to standard European (and Herodotus already said this commenting Egyptians had brown skin, but so did so many peoples… Very different from Nubia to the south and its black denizens…)  

A similar phenomenon is happening in Algeria, where the dictatorship justifies incarcerating the innocent, killing its own citizens, today, with allegations of genocide committed by the French 2 centuries ago. The allegations are entirely imaginary: France made war in Algeria, against a particular Emir, and when the Emir was finally captured with his army and his harem and smala… Peace was made with the Emir, Abdelkader… Who was a great man…And who retired peacefully, in freedom, comfort and wealth, first in France and later in Syria… The connection? Algerians who say things inimical to the Algerian dictatorship are alleged to work for the French occupier. Senegal, and actually all of Africa, is tempted to follow the same route. This way a small African plutocracy can accuse civilization (France) to cause trouble in Africa.

It is tempting to feel the same trick has been used in Africa since time immemorial. So when a Carthagenan admiral showed up, the local cannibalistic plutocrat could have used Carthage to cause trouble.

Instead the correct attitude is that, when elements of civilization show up, one ought to adopt them. After all, European agriculture was founded and funded by Fertile Crescent immigrants, etc. The very reason for the success of MIDDLE EARTH has been the will to accept all the better ideas and people, wherever they come from… This is so well-known, the idea is explicitly in the Qur’an:”find science wherever it is, even in China!”. There are other allusions in the Qur’an showing a deep understanding of what civilization was about… For example the Qur’an prophetizes why the Romans would ultimately always win… so even in Mecca, the nature of progress was understood. After all, to the south of Mecca sat Yemen (with the oldest large dam), and on the other side of the Red Sea, Ethiopia which, with Kush to its north had long interacted with Egypt… Ethiopia evolved its own script around 500 BCE (and it’s fully original, being neither an alphabet nor a syllabary; it modifies consonants with secondary symbols).

There is nothing irremediably wrong about oneself having ancestors who didn’t read, write, and were living in an ambiance of slavery, war and cannibalism. Of course, all ancestors are like that, as those who were eaten didn’t make it. Having very recent ancestors indulging in these old arts is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a force, a knowledge and a wisdom: confronting, inside oneself, mindsets spanning 6,000 years!.  

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Unfortunately for Africa, Islam, a desert religion from the early middle ages, originated by a caravan raider (PBUH!) has been gaining more than the secular open society of the better Greeks promoted in writing by Aspasia (and her little helper Pericles).

Yes, Aspasia was a woman, a female, like the goddess Athena…

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To progress, Africa has to look soberly at the situation: Africa was either out of civilization (Black Africa) or in a decaying civilization (North Africa) and it turned around because of the Mission Civilisatrice. Denying reality much further will have drastic consequences… Moreover, and not incidentally, Islam is a false friend: the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, MBS, seems to have understood this well and is trying to unload Islam ASAP. Islam is a KILLER RELIGION: it kills apostates, and thus, first of all, by instituting a climate of terror, Islam KILLS IDEAS and those who could or did generate them. For verification, watch the Algerian dictatorship trying to emprison to death Boualem Sensal, just because the dictators in Algeria don’t like critiques.

Killing ideas and their creators is the recipe for dictatorship and that, in turn is the recipe for further stupidification. Africa got cut off the Middle Earth a bit as Tasmania got cut off Australia which also got cut off Eurasia (don’t laugh: New Guinea got the sweet potato, thanks to the enterprising Philipinos on steroids known as Polynesians… Just as been cut off is bad, been in communication is good…). The natural and historical partners of Africa are Europe, and of course, its American colonies… Throwing Europe out as Africa is doing now, just because the meek French president is all too ready to retreat from a good fight (true he is not supported by the woke French republic of ignorant judges and pseudo-left sheep). It is more than short sighted… It’s criminal… The incoming two billion Africans, one must fear, will visit Hades before they visit the civilization they are busy rejecting now (I hope they change their minds). Lack of literacy did not provide Africa with the needed mental depth, because the resulting illiterate mentality inherited through the generations sustained ignorance, right… But doing it now deliberately, and with perseverance evolves an evil mindset that was not there before... Playing with the devil is the best way to get burned.

Ah, to finish with one of the question in the title, why is it that explaining with a deeply illiterate mindset (even and especially among the elites) the failures of Africa so hard to come by? Simply because to keep Africa stupid has been highly profitable to European and American elites. For example the honorable BHL, the (deservely influential) philosopher Bernard Henri Levy (who followed me on a few issues), a billionaire, fostered further (and saved!) his immense inherited fortune thanks to his political connections in Africa and Europe, boosting his father’s company in a tree cutting empire [1].

Differently from BHL, I have nothing to lose, no business contract which will go poof in the night, so I am completely free to reveal the truth: smarts is what Africa needs, smarts is what Africa did not have, civilizationally speaking, and smarts come from analyzing reality carefully enough to master adversity, and Africa is best advised to become familiar with all these all too arcane notions.

Illiteracy was the heart of darkness, and that’s no fiction [2].

Patrice Ayme

Here is a (partial) list of early writing systems developed independently. The Ethiopian system is missing (it was highly original). Aside from Tifinagh and Egyptian scripts, it was the only real writing developed in Africa. (Nsibidi, the only Black African in the list is really a proto-writing system). For an even more complete list, including Cretan scripts, see further down.

[1] BHL’s father, André Lévy (1922–1995), was a French businessman who founded the Becob group, a timber and wood industry company. Becob operated in Africa, particularly in Côte d’Ivoire, where it was heavily involved in the logging industry. BHL inherited Becob and controls media outfits as all serious plutocrats do.

[2] Boko Haram, a terrorist Islamist group in Nigeria, killed more than 300,000 children (yes, 300 K kids, dead). “Boko” (“fake”) alludes to Civilization”. Haram is forbidden in Arabic. So Boko Haram means “civilization is forbideen”… at least so said… Boko Haram in 2009…

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LIST OF ALL ANCIENT SCRIPTS… None in Sub Saharan Africa… of ancient writing systems, including American scripts, organized by region and chronology.

1. Mesopotamian & Near Eastern Scripts

✅ Sumerian Cuneiform (c. 3100 BCE – 100 CE) → First known writing system
✅ Akkadian Cuneiform (c. 2500 BCE – 100 CE) → Used for Babylonian & Assyrian
✅ Elamite Cuneiform (c. 2500 BCE – 400 BCE) → Used in Persia
✅ Hurrian & Urartian Cuneiform (c. 1500 BCE – 600 BCE) → Anatolia & Caucasus
✅ Old Persian Cuneiform (c. 525 BCE – 330 BCE) → Official script of Achaemenid Persia

2. Egyptian & Related Scripts

✅ Egyptian Hieroglyphs (c. 3100 BCE – 400 CE) → Monumental writing
✅ Hieratic (c. 2700 BCE – 600 BCE) → Cursive script of scribes
✅ Demotic (c. 650 BCE – 400 CE) → Everyday Egyptian script
✅ Meroitic Script (c. 300 BCE – 400 CE) → Used in Nubia (Sudan), undeciphered

3. Cretan & Aegean Scripts

✅ Cretan Hieroglyphs (c. 2000–1600 BCE) → Undeciphered Minoan script
✅ Linear A (c. 1800–1450 BCE) → Undeciphered, used by the Minoans
✅ Linear B (c. 1450–1200 BCE) → First Greek script, used by Mycenaeans
✅ Cypro-Minoan Script (c. 1500–1000 BCE) → Likely derived from Linear A, undeciphered
✅ Cypriot Syllabary (c. 1000–200 BCE) → Used for Greek in Cyprus

4. Anatolian Scripts

✅ Luwian Hieroglyphs (c. 1400–600 BCE) → Used in Hittite & Luwian languages
✅ Phoenician Alphabet (c. 1050 BCE – 200 BCE) → Ancestor of most modern alphabets
✅ Carian, Lydian, Lycian Scripts (c. 700–300 BCE) → Local Anatolian alphabets

5. Indo-Aryan & Indian Scripts

✅ Indus Script (c. 2600–1900 BCE) → Undeciphered
✅ Brahmi (c. 300 BCE – 500 CE) → Ancestor of most Indian scripts
✅ Kharosthi (c. 300 BCE – 300 CE) → Used in ancient Pakistan/Afghanistan
✅ Gupta Script (c. 4th–6th century CE) → Precursor to Devanagari & others

6. Chinese & East Asian Scripts

✅ Oracle Bone Script (c. 1200 BCE) → First Chinese writing
✅ Seal Script (c. 1000 BCE – 200 CE) → Early form of Chinese characters
✅ Clerical Script (c. 200 BCE – 200 CE) → Used for official records
✅ Korean Idu & Hyangchal (c. 600–1400 CE) → Early Korean writing before Hangul

7. European & Alphabetic Scripts

✅ Runes (Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, etc.) (c. 150 CE – 1000 CE) → Used by Germanic tribes
✅ Etruscan Alphabet (c. 700–100 BCE) → Influenced the Latin alphabet
✅ Latin Alphabet (c. 700 BCE – Present) → Most widely used script today
✅ Greek Alphabet (c. 800 BCE – Present) → First full alphabet (with vowels)

8. African Indigenous Scripts

✅ Tifinagh (c. 300 BCE – Present) → Used by Berbers/Tuaregs, evolved from Phoenician
✅ Meroitic (c. 300 BCE – 400 CE) → Nubian script, undeciphered
✅ Ge’ez (Ethiopic Script) (c. 5th century BCE – Present) → Still used in Ethiopia/Eritrea

In contradiction with “Africocentrism” (Diop), none of these African scripts are from, or even reached, Subsaharan Africa.

9. American Indigenous Writing Systems

✅ Olmec Cascajal Block (c. 900 BCE – 400 BCE) → Possibly earliest Mesoamerican script, undeciphered
✅ Zapotec Script (c. 500 BCE – 600 CE) → One of the earliest Mesoamerican writings
✅ Mayan Hieroglyphs (c. 300 BCE – 1700 CE) → Fully developed writing system
✅ Epi-Olmec (Isthmian) Script (c. 300 BCE – 500 CE) → Undeciphered script from Veracruz
✅ Mixtec Codices (c. 900–1500 CE) → Pictographic writing system
✅ Aztec Codices (Nahuatl Writing) (c. 1300–1600 CE) → Mostly pictographic with some phonetic elements
✅ Inca Quipu (c. 1400–1600 CE) → Knot-based recording system, may encode phonetic information