Primitive writings in the Sahara
With the development of the life of the first humans and the formation of human societies, man found himself unable to understand others, so he turned to language and lived in other societies. He invented writing to preserve his intellectual production and his cultural and scientific heritage from extinction and to be passed on to subsequent generations.
Writing in Europe began in the form of images expressing daily life, such as some inscriptions and pictures that are 35,000 years old, as found in the caves of “Lasco” in France and “Altamira” in Spain. It was a pictorial language in its primitive form. At the beginning of its era, writing consisted of pictures that completely suggested what was drawn in them. Then it developed into symbolic images that suggest a certain meaning. These symbols were difficult for the public to understand. They resorted to using symbols that suggest specific sounds, and these phonetic symbols were an essential step in the emergence of the alphabet and in the development of writing later.
The primitive writings of the Sahara are the mother roots of the Libo-Amazigh letters, as well as the ancient European letters.
A study by Spanish linguists from the Complutense University in Madrid suggests that the ancient writings that appeared in Europe date back mainly to the Sahara region, as primitive writings were recently discovered in the Timaso region in the Alhagar highlands in southern Algeria dating back to a time exceeding six thousand years.
These writings, according to these researchers, are the oldest of all and are considered the mother roots of the Amazigh letters, “Tifinagh,” as well as the ancient European letters, “from which the modern letters that are now used and most widespread in the world came.” It is worth noting, according to the same researchers, that these primitive writings were also found in the Canary Islands bordering the Sahara Desert, which are inhabited by the Guanche Berbers, which confirms what the study concluded.
These researchers believe that the spread of these writings outside the Sahara Desert came as a result of the migration of some of the Sahara’s inhabitants at the beginning of the drought and desertification of the Sahara Desert, and their transfer of these primitive writings to the areas they reached.
*Study link:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Iberian-inscriptions-in-Sahara-Desert-rocks-(Ti-m-Arnaiz-Villena-Ru%C3%ADz-del-Valle/33e720f3c4615f8b598cd228200459f5ae9955fb