I made this post in another forum without much success. I'm wondering if anyone in this one has more knowledge on the topic.
Just to clarify, I'm referring to Africa south of the Sahara. I hear numerous accounts about written scripts found in Sub-Saharan Africa. From the Mali Empire, Songhai, and Hausa kingdoms and all of the Swahili states that minted their own coins bearing Arabic scripts. And of course the Ethiopians who still use their own indigenous script to this day. I'm already well aware that there were plenty of literate states in S.S Africa. However any and every time there are any references to the history of Africa (including the previously mentioned states) it seems to always reference North African, Arabic, or European sources. Were the S.S. nations simply not using their script for recording history? Was it used specifically for math, science, and religion? Timbuktu has over 700,000 manuscripts dating from the 1200s yet all references I see about the empire come from Egypt, Morocco, and griots. Why not refer to the 700,000 scripts in Mali? The Swahili coast were very advanced with stone buildings, sewage systems, sail ships and used Arabic writing systems. Where are all of their books? Were they not used for recording history? Yet again... where are the written accounts of these places? The Gedi Ruins are lost to history due to lack of written records. Why?
There are numerous documents written in African scripts that can be used to write history but, there is no written history by Africans.
Writing history involves interpretation of documents. Africans have maintained oral traditional that record information about rulers and important events that can be used to write history, but the teller of these traditional history does not interpret the information they recite.
There are thousand of written documents in Africa, written in African scripts. Most of these documents are obituaries or annals that record events in the life of important personages. As a result, if you learn the languages associated with the scripts you can write history.
The first syllabic writing system of Africans was the Thinite script. This writing was used first by Blacks in Nubia, like the Niger-Congo people who migrated out of this region into the rest of Africa.
The Thinite script provides many of the signs that are included in later scripts used by Africans.
In Nubia, Black Africans were using Thinite symbols before the rise of Egypt to record their ideas and report on important events.
At this time your people may have been living in the caves of the Caucasus mountains.
This writing was later used by Africans to write inscriptions throughout Middle Africa.
The evidence of this writing is found throughout the Sahara. By the time Mande speaking people settled Dar Tichitt they left numerous inscriptions.
The people of Dar Tichitt were Mande speakers. These Mande speaking people also lived in the Fezzan where they were called Garamante/Garamandes. The Garamante settled Crete and are recognized as the Eteo-Cretans or Minoans.
As you can see from the above chart the Linear A signs and Mande/Manding signs are identical. If you look careful you will note that Africans, or Black people had also taken their writing system to Anatolia were your ancestors were living in the Caucasus mountains as hunter-gatherers.
The Minoans, who were Africans introduced Linear A, whose signs are identical to the writing left by Africans throughout the Sahara, like those found at Tichitt and presently represented in the Vai and several other West African scripts.
Europeans adopted Linear A writing to write business documents and we know it as Linear B.
Europeans only got writing from the Egyptians. The Greeks who obtained writing from the Blacks of Africa and Phonesia passed on writing to the Romans. With the fall of Rome Western Europeans got writing from the African Muslims who taught them the arts and sciences.
It is a myth that Africans lacked literacy. Africans usually based their wrtiting systems on the ancient Thinite script used by African people before the founding of ancient Egypt. Thinite was probably the script of the Proto Saharans.
East and West Africans continue to use traditional writing systems especially in their Secret Societies. The vast majority of Writing systems in West Africa are found Among the Mande speaking people. The Bambara speakers for example used the Masaba system of writing.
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The Thinite origin of writing in Africa is evident when we compare Vai and Thamudic. The Vai script is a writing system used by the Mande speaking people. The symbols related to Vai was used to write the Lybico-Berber inscriptions and sign post located on the Chariot routes from the Fezzan to the Niger Valley.
The Thamudic writing system was used in Ethiopia and Arabia. This writing was used to record the Semitic language.
The Vai and Thamudic scripts share many signs. These cognate signs have similar sounds.
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The fact that Thamudic and Vai have similar symbols, and sounds for these letters makes it clear that the writing systems separated by thousands of miles probably originated fron the same ancestral script, that we call Thinite.
Great post! Minus the "Your people may have been living in caves." I'm not European if that's what you're thinking.