What Was the Earliest Language in the World?

Short answer

• There is no single language that can honestly be called the earliest language in the world. Spoken language is far older than writing, and speech leaves no fossils, so the first spoken language left no record of itself.
• The oldest language we can actually read is Sumerian. It was first written in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, around 3100 BCE, using cuneiform signs pressed into clay tablets. Egyptian evidence is about as old, from around 3250 BCE, so which script came first is still debated, and Akkadian followed later.
• Linguists can estimate when the capacity for language appeared. Fossil and genetic evidence suggests it was probably present at least 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and a 2025 genomic study puts it at least 135,000 years ago. That is a date for the ability to speak, not for any one language.
• Languages can be rebuilt backward from their descendants. Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of English, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, is estimated at about 8,100 years old. But reconstruction reaches a limit after roughly 10,000 years, because words change too fast to trace further back with confidence.
• The honest answer depends on what "earliest" means: the first spoken language, the first written language, or the oldest language still spoken. Each question has a different answer, and the first of the three has no answer at all.

Why There Is No Single Answer

Ask which language came first and you will get confident answers, especially online. One page will tell you it was Sumerian. Another will say Tamil. A third will say Hebrew, or Sanskrit, or Chinese. The confidence is misleading. Each of those answers is answering a different question, and none of them is the first spoken language of humanity.

The problem is evidence. People have been talking for far longer than they have been writing. The earliest writing we know of is about 5,000 years old. Spoken language is at least 135,000 years old, and probably older. That leaves an enormous gap, tens of thousands of years of talking, singing, arguing, and storytelling, with not one word of it recorded. Whatever the first language was, it vanished without a trace long before anyone invented a way to write it down.

There is a second problem. Languages do not have birthdays. A language does not appear on a fixed date the way a person is born. It splits slowly from its neighbors, the way English split slowly from the Germanic languages over centuries, until speakers on either side can no longer understand each other. Ask when English began and you get a range of centuries, not a date. Ask the same question about the first language of all, and the range becomes so wide that it stops being an answer.

This article does not crown a winner. It explains what the evidence actually supports, where the evidence runs out, and why the careful answer is more interesting than the confident one.

Speech Came First, and It Left No Fossils

The oldest question in this story is when humans started talking at all. Nobody knows for sure, but the evidence narrows the range. Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, reviewed the fossil and genetic evidence in the journal BMC Biology in 2017 and concluded that language, or at least the capacity for it, is probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years old. His reasoning is straightforward. Every human group on Earth has language, and all modern humans descend from populations of anatomically modern Homo sapiens who lived in Africa around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. The capacity for language was probably already present in those populations before they spread across the world.

A newer study sets a firmer minimum. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2025, based on genome-level studies of how early Homo sapiens populations divided, concluded that linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population at least 135,000 years ago, before the first division of that population. The authors are careful about what this proves. It sets a latest possible date for the capacity, not a date for the first words. It tells us when language must have existed by, not when it began.

Genetics adds a second line of evidence. Modern humans and Neanderthals share a version of a gene called FOXP2 that differs from the chimpanzee version by two amino acid changes. FOXP2 affects the fine motor control of the facial muscles used in speech. Pagel notes that if Neanderthals had language, its origin would reach back at least as far as the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals, currently thought to have lived around 550,000 to 750,000 years ago. But he also notes the counterevidence. Neanderthals show almost no sign of the symbolic thinking that usually accompanies language, no art or sculpture in Europe as recently as 40,000 years ago, while Homo sapiens of the same period had plentiful art, musical instruments, and specialized tools. His conclusion is that language probably arose in our own lineage after the split from our common ancestor with Neanderthals, and probably by no later than 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

None of this tells us what that first language sounded like, how many words it had, or whether there was one language or several. Speech is sound, and sound does not fossilize. A stone tool can survive for a million years. A spoken sentence is gone the moment it is said. That is why the first language is unknowable in principle, not just unknown for now. No future discovery can recover a conversation that was never recorded.

For a sense of scale, consider how many languages exist today. Scientists are aware of more than 7,100 languages in use, according to Scientific American, and nearly 40 percent of them are considered endangered. More than half of the world’s population uses one of just 23 tongues. Our guide to how many languages are in the world explains how linguists count them and why the number keeps changing. Every one of those 7,100 languages descends, somehow, from the speech of those early African populations. But the family tree between then and now is lost.

Three Different Questions Hiding in One

Most of the confusion about the earliest language comes from mixing up three separate questions. Each has a different answer, and keeping them apart clears up most of the argument.

The first question is: what was the first language ever spoken? This has no answer. It is unknowable, for the reasons above. Speech predates writing by tens of thousands of years, and no record of it survives.

The second question is: what is the oldest language with a written record? This has an answer, with a small caveat. Sumerian is the leading candidate, first written around 3100 BCE. Egyptian evidence is about as old, from around 3250 BCE. Which of the two is truly first depends on how you count the earliest signs, and scholars still debate it. Either way, the answer is measured in thousands of years, not hundreds of thousands.

The third question is: what is the oldest language still spoken today? This is a different question again, and it belongs to a separate article. It involves Tamil, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Sanskrit, and the dates are fiercely debated. Our companion article on the oldest language still spoken covers that question in full. This article stays with the earliest language ever, and with what writing can and cannot prove about it.

There is also a fourth question that often gets smuggled in: which language family is oldest? That question has a partial answer. Contemporary linguists widely accept Afroasiatic, the family that includes Hebrew and Arabic, as the oldest language family, with roots traced back to 18,000 to 8,000 BCE. But that is a family, not a language, and the date range is very wide.

Sumerian: The Oldest Language We Can Read

If “earliest” means “the earliest we can actually read,” the answer is Sumerian. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Sumerian as a language isolate and the oldest written language in existence, first attested about 3100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia. A language isolate is a language with no known relatives, and Sumerian has none. It is unrelated to any other known language.

Sumerian was spoken in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now southern Iraq. The Sumerians built some of the first cities in the world, and their language flourished during the third millennium BCE. Around 2000 BCE, Akkadian, a Semitic language, gradually replaced Sumerian as the everyday spoken language of Mesopotamia. But Sumerian did not die out at once. It continued in written use for centuries afterward, as a language of scholarship, religion, and law, much as Latin continued in Europe long after people stopped speaking it at home. For more on the world Sumerian came from, see our guide to the first civilization on Earth.

The script Sumerian was written in is called cuneiform, from the Latin word for wedge, because scribes pressed a reed stylus into wet clay to make wedge-shaped marks. Cuneiform is a writing system, not a language, and it was later borrowed to write more than a dozen other languages, including Akkadian, Hittite, and Old Persian. Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor, curators at the British Museum, explain in their book Cuneiform that the script traces its roots to around 3200 BCE, when writing was invented at Uruk, and that it was invented as a bookkeeping tool. The earliest Sumerian writing, Britannica notes, is almost exclusively made up of business and administrative texts: lists of grain, livestock, and laborers, not poems or stories.

That detail matters. Writing was not invented so people could write literature. It was invented so people could keep accounts. The first written language we know of appears in the record because someone needed to record how many sheep a temple owned. Literature came later, once the tool existed.

One caution is needed about the earliest dates. The very first signs, from the proto-literate period around 3200 to 3000 BCE, were so simple that scholars disagree about whether the language written with them is Sumerian at all. The signs record objects and numbers, but they do not yet show the grammar that would prove which language is being written. The identification becomes certain only with Archaic Sumerian, from about 3000 to 2500 BCE, when inscriptions start to show grammatical elements. So 3100 BCE is the best estimate for the first Sumerian writing, not a date carved in stone.

Egyptian and Akkadian: Almost as Old

Sumerian was not alone for long. Ancient Egyptian appeared at almost the same time, and the two scripts may have been invented independently. Ilona Regulski, writing in the Oxford Handbook of Topics in Archaeology, reports that the earliest evidence of phonetic writing in Egypt dates to about 3250 BCE, from tomb U-j at Abydos, the burial place of a predynastic ruler. The tomb, discovered in 1988 by Gunter Dreyer and his team, contained small ivory labels with signs attached to goods. Those labels are the oldest samples of writing in Egypt, and they pushed the beginning of hieroglyphic writing earlier than scholars had previously thought.

Regulski also records that the earliest known complete sentence in the Egyptian language has been dated to about 2690 BCE. Scientific American gives a similar account: archaeologists found Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into the tomb of Pharaoh Seth-Peribsen, dating to around the same period as the earliest cuneiform, and the inscription is considered the earliest known complete sentence. It reads, in translation, “He has united the Two Lands for his son, Dual King Peribsen.”

Egyptian writing lasted an extraordinarily long time. The last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at the temple of Philae in 394 CE, more than 3,500 years after the first labels at Abydos. The script survived because it was carved in stone and written on papyrus, and because Egyptian civilization itself lasted for millennia. Our guide to Egypt’s Great Pyramid tells the story of the civilization that produced it, and our guide to whether Egypt is in Africa answers a question that surprises more readers than it should.

Akkadian, the Semitic language that replaced Sumerian in daily speech, is the third member of the group. Scientific American reports that historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct as spoken languages. Akkadian was written in cuneiform borrowed from Sumerian, and it became the diplomatic language of the ancient Near East for more than a thousand years.

How did we learn to read these languages at all? The answer involves two of the most famous objects in archaeology. The Rosetta Stone, a decree issued in 196 BCE, was found near Rosetta in Egypt in 1799. It carries the same text in three scripts, hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek, and it gave scholars the key they needed. Jean-Francois Champollion announced his decipherment of the hieroglyphs on 27 September 1822. Cuneiform was deciphered in the early decades of the 19th century, after scholars worked out that the same script recorded several different languages. Until those breakthroughs, the oldest written languages in the world were silent.

Writing Is Not the Same as Language

The most common mistake in this subject is treating the oldest written language as if it were the first spoken language. It is not. Writing is a technology, invented relatively recently, for recording language. Language itself is far older. Confusing the two is like confusing the invention of the camera with the invention of faces.

Writing was invented more than once. Mesopotamia and Egypt each developed writing on their own, and the first certain evidence of Egyptian writing was developed independently of Mesopotamia, according to Regulski. Later, China developed its own writing system, with the earliest documented evidence coming from inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones about 3,300 years ago, according to Scientific American. Mesoamerica developed writing independently as well. Each invention was separate, and each one recorded a language that had already been spoken for thousands of years.

That is why Sumerian, impressive as it is, cannot be the first language. Sumerian was already a fully developed language when it was first written down, with grammar, vocabulary, and a long history behind it. The people who first pressed signs into clay at Uruk were not inventing language. They were inventing a way to record a language that their grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents, had already spoken. The same is true of Egyptian, Chinese, and every other early written language. Writing captures a language at one moment in its history. It says nothing about when that language began.

The gap is hard to picture, so it helps to put numbers on it. Writing is about 5,000 years old. The capacity for language is at least 135,000 years old. That means writing covers less than 4 percent of the history of human language. The other 96 percent is unwritten, and it is gone. If the whole history of language were a single day, writing would have been invented in the last hour.

There is a related point about books. People sometimes ask about the oldest book, as if a book would settle the question. It does not. The oldest surviving books are thousands of years younger than the oldest writing, and they record languages that were already old. Our guide to the oldest book in the world covers that story separately.

Rebuilding Languages That Were Never Written Down

If writing only goes back 5,000 years, how do linguists know anything about older languages? The answer is reconstruction. Languages leave descendants, and descendants carry traces of their ancestors in their words. By comparing related languages, linguists can work backward to the language they all came from, even though that language was never written down.

The classic example is Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and many more. Nobody ever wrote Proto-Indo-European down. It was spoken thousands of years before writing reached Europe. But linguists have rebuilt much of its vocabulary and grammar by comparing its descendants. The English word “mother,” the German “Mutter,” the Latin “mater,” and the Sanskrit “matr” all descend from the same Proto-Indo-European word, and hundreds of such matches let scholars reconstruct the parent language with real confidence.

In 2023, a large international study in the journal Science gave that reconstruction a new date. Paul Heggarty and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology analyzed core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient or historical ones, using ancestry-enabled Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. They estimated that the Indo-European family is approximately 8,100 years old, with five main branches already split off by around 7,000 years ago. They proposed a hybrid hypothesis for the family’s origin: an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus, with a later branch northward onto the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. The study does not settle a debate that has run for 200 years, and other linguists dispute the date, but it shows how far reconstruction can reach.

English itself descends from this family through its Germanic branch, and our guide to how Old English developed from Germanic tribes traces one part of that journey. The same method works for other families. Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the ancestor of Chinese, Burmese, and the Tibetan languages, is estimated to have emerged around 4,500 years ago, although the exact date is disputed. Hebrew and Arabic belong to the Afroasiatic family, whose roots trace back to 18,000 to 8,000 BCE, a range so wide that it shows the limits of the method. Our guide to what language the Bible was written in explains how Hebrew and its neighbors fit into this family.

Reconstruction has a hard limit. Words change, and they change fast. After about 10,000 years, so much has changed that the traces become too faint to follow with confidence. Linguists can rebuild Proto-Indo-European at 8,100 years old. They cannot rebuild the language spoken 50,000 years ago, because the words have been replaced too many times. That limit is not a failure of method. It is a property of language itself. Words are replaced the way cells are replaced in a body, and after enough time, nothing original remains.

The Idea of One Original Language

The most tempting idea in this whole subject is that all languages descend from a single original tongue, sometimes called Proto-Human or Proto-World. If that were true, then in a sense all languages would be equally old, and the first language would simply be that common ancestor. Scientific American quotes the linguist Danny Hieber on this point: if most languages can be traced back to an original, universal human language, all languages are equally old. “You know that your parents spoke a language, and their parents spoke a language, and so forth. So intuitively, you’d imagine that all languages were born from a single origin,” Hieber says.

The problem is proof. As Scientific American puts it, it is impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language, the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world. The evidence runs out long before it could reach that far back. Pagel makes the same point in his 2017 review: vocabulary and grammar change too rapidly to link all of the world’s languages to a common original mother tongue.

That does not mean a single origin is impossible. All humans share the same anatomical and neurological equipment for language, and all human languages share deep structural features: they combine sounds into words, they recognize past, present, and future, and they structure words into sentences. Those shared features suggest a common origin, but they do not prove it, and they say nothing about what that original language sounded like. It could have been one language spoken by one small group in Africa. It could have been several languages that arose independently. The evidence cannot tell us, and honest linguistics says so.

There is a related hypothesis worth mentioning because readers will meet it elsewhere. The Nostratic hypothesis proposes an even larger family that would link Indo-European with several other families, including Afroasiatic and Uralic. It is a minority view, and most historical linguists do not accept it, because the proposed sound correspondences are not regular enough to be convincing. It is mentioned here so that readers who encounter it know its status: interesting, unproven, and not the consensus.

The politics around this question deserve a mention too. Scientific American quotes Deven Patel, a professor of South Asia studies at the University of Pennsylvania, on the disputes over Sanskrit and Tamil: “To answer this question, we’ve seen people create new histories, which are as much political as they are scientific. There are bragging rights associated with being the oldest and still evolving language.” The same applies to many “oldest language” claims. They are often less about evidence than about pride, and they should be read with that in mind.

What About the Oldest Language Still Spoken?

Readers often mean a different question when they ask about the earliest language: which ancient language is still spoken today? That question has its own candidates and its own arguments. Tamil is often named, with written records going back at least 2,000 years, although scholars dispute the true age of the oldest surviving Tamil work, the Tolkappiyam, with estimates ranging from 7,000 to 2,800 years. Sanskrit is also named. Its earliest written records are the Vedas, Hindu texts composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE, and Patel argues that Sanskrit is the oldest continuous language tradition, still producing literature and still spoken, although not as a first language in the modern era. Hebrew and Arabic are named as well, because their timelines can be reasonably traced, and both belong to the Afroasiatic family. Chinese is another candidate, emerging from Proto-Sino-Tibetan around 4,500 years ago.

This article does not settle that question, because it is a different question, and it needs its own full treatment. Our companion article on the oldest language still spoken covers the candidates, the evidence for each, and why the answer depends on how you define “still spoken.” The distinction matters. A language can be ancient and still spoken, like Tamil, or ancient and extinct, like Sumerian. “Earliest ever” and “oldest still spoken” are not the same thing, and mixing them up is how most misleading claims are made.

The Vedas deserve a brief note because they connect to another ancient story. They are the oldest layer of Hindu scripture, and they were composed in Sanskrit more than 3,000 years ago. Our guide to the world’s oldest religion puts that tradition in its wider context, alongside the other early faiths. The Indus Valley, where one of the world’s earliest urban civilizations grew up, is covered in our guide to civilization in the Indus Valley. The Indus script, found on seals from that civilization, has never been deciphered, which is a reminder of how much of the ancient world remains unreadable.

What We Can Honestly Say

After all the hedging, what can be said with confidence? Quite a lot, as long as each claim is kept to what its evidence supports.

The table is the article in miniature. The first language is unknown. The oldest written language is Sumerian, with Egyptian evidence from about 3250 BCE, so the order is still debated. The capacity for language is at least 135,000 years old. Reconstruction reaches back about 10,000 years and no further. Everything else is a matter of definition, and the definition is where most arguments go wrong.

That is not a disappointing answer. It is a remarkable one. We can read words written 5,000 years ago by people who kept accounts of sheep and grain. We can rebuild languages that were never written down, and date them to within centuries. We can trace the ancestry of English back 8,100 years to a language spoken south of the Caucasus. And we can say, with evidence, that the ability to speak is at least 135,000 years old. What we cannot do is name the first language. That silence is itself a fact about the deep past, and it is worth respecting.

FAQ

What was the earliest language in the world?

There is no single language that can honestly be called the earliest. Spoken language is at least 135,000 years old, and probably 150,000 to 200,000 years old, but speech leaves no record. The oldest language we can actually read is Sumerian, first written around 3100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia.

Is Sumerian the first language ever spoken?

No. Sumerian is the oldest language with a written record that we can read, but it was already a fully developed language when it was first written down. People had been speaking for tens of thousands of years before writing was invented, and the languages they spoke left no trace.

What is the oldest written language?

Sumerian is generally considered the oldest written language, first attested around 3100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia and written in cuneiform on clay tablets. Egyptian evidence is about as old, with the earliest evidence from tomb U-j at Abydos dating to about 3250 BCE, although scholars still debate which script came first.

How old is human language?

The capacity for language was probably present at least 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, according to fossil and genetic evidence reviewed by Mark Pagel in 2017. A 2025 genomic study puts it at least 135,000 years ago. These are dates for the ability to speak, not for any one language, and the true origin could be older.

What is Proto-Indo-European, and how old is it?

Proto-Indo-European is the reconstructed ancestor of English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and many other languages. It was never written down. A 2023 study in the journal Science estimated the family at about 8,100 years old, with a homeland south of the Caucasus.

Can linguists reconstruct the first human language?

No. Reconstruction works by comparing related languages and tracing shared words back to a common ancestor, but words change too fast for the method to reach further than about 10,000 years. A hypothetical proto-human language cannot be proved to exist, and its words cannot be recovered.

What is the difference between the earliest language and the oldest language still spoken?

The earliest language ever spoken is unknown, because speech predates writing. The oldest language still spoken is a separate question about which ancient language has living speakers today, and the candidates include Tamil, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Sanskrit. Our companion article on the oldest language still spoken covers that question.

Why do different sources name different “oldest” languages?

Because they are answering different questions: first spoken, first written, oldest still spoken, or oldest language family. They also use different definitions of what counts as the same language over time. Claims about the oldest language are also sometimes political, as scholars have noted, because there are bragging rights attached to being the oldest.

Was writing invented once or several times?

Several times. Mesopotamia and Egypt each developed writing independently, and China and Mesoamerica later developed their own writing systems. Each invention recorded a language that had already been spoken for thousands of years.

How do we know how old Sumerian is?

From the clay tablets themselves. The earliest Sumerian writing appears around 3100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia, and the script, cuneiform, can be dated by the archaeological layers in which the tablets were found. The earliest tablets are administrative records, lists of goods and laborers, and the identification of the language becomes certain once grammatical elements appear in the inscriptions.

Sources & references

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Sumerian language", https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sumerian-language (language isolate and the oldest written language in existence; first attested about 3100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia; flourished during the third millennium BCE; replaced as a spoken language by Akkadian about 2000 BCE; earliest Sumerian writing almost exclusively business and administrative texts).
• Scientific American, "What's the World's Oldest Language?", https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-the-worlds-oldest-language1/?ref=polymath.net (24 August 2023; more than 7,100 languages in use today, nearly 40 percent endangered, more than half of the world's population uses one of just 23 tongues; Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian generally agreed to be the oldest languages with a clear written record; Afroasiatic widely accepted as the oldest language family, roots 18,000 to 8,000 BCE; Proto-Sino-Tibetan around 4,500 years ago; Chinese writing evidence about 3,300 years ago; Sanskrit Vedas composed 1500 to 1200 BCE; Tamil documented at least 2,000 years, Tolkappiyam dating contested from 7,000 to 2,800 years; proto-human language impossible to prove).
• Mark Pagel, "Q&A: What is human language, when did it evolve and why should we care?", BMC Biology 15:64 (2017), https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525259/ (language capacity probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years old; Neanderthal common ancestor around 550,000 to 750,000 years ago; shared FOXP2 variant; vocabulary and grammar change too rapidly to link all languages to a common mother tongue).
• "Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago", Frontiers in Psychology 16:1503900 (2025), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40134728/ (genome-level studies suggest the initial population division within Homo sapiens occurred about 135,000 years ago, so the potential for language must have been present by then at the latest).
• Paul Heggarty and colleagues, "Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages", Science 381:6656 (28 July 2023), DOI: 10.1126/science.abg0818, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37499002/ (core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages; root age about 8,120 years before present; five main branches split by around 7,000 years ago; hybrid hypothesis with an ultimate homeland south of the Caucasus and a later branch onto the Steppe).
• Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, "New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages" (28 July 2023), https://www.uni-jena.de/en/198847/new-insights-into-the-origin-of-the-indo-european-languages?orient=body&index=2&vcard=1 (Indo-European estimated to be around 8,100 years old; team of over 80 language specialists; dataset of core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages including 52 ancient or historical languages).
• Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor, Cuneiform, British Museum Press (2015), https://archive.org/stream/livro-cuneiform-british-museum/Livro%20Cuneiform%20British%20Museum_djvu.txt (cuneiform the oldest form of writing in the world as far as we know; invented around 3200 BCE at Uruk as a bookkeeping tool; cuneiform is a writing system, not a language, and not an alphabet; used 600 to 1,000 characters; two main languages written in it are Sumerian and Akkadian).
• Ilona Regulski, "The Origins and Early Development of Writing in Egypt", Oxford Handbook of Topics in Archaeology (2016), DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935413.013.61, https://www.academia.edu/26748117/The_Origins_and_Early_Development_of_Writing_in_Egypt (earliest evidence of phonetic writing in Egypt about 3250 BCE; earliest known complete sentence in Egyptian dated about 2690 BCE; tomb U-j at Abydos, discovered 1988; first certain evidence of Egyptian writing developed independently).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Rosetta Stone", https://www.britannica.com/today-in-history/September-27-1822-Rosetta-Stone-Decoded-by-Champollion (stone found near Rosetta in 1799; Jean-Francois Champollion announced the decipherment on 27 September 1822).
• British Museum, "How Egyptian hieroglyphs were decoded, a timeline to decipherment", https://staging.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hieroglyphs-unlocking-ancient-egypt/egyptian-hieroglyphs-decipherment-timeline (Rosetta Stone decree issued 27 March 196 BCE; found July 1799; public reading of Champollion's letter on 27 September 1822 considered the moment of decipherment).
• Smithsonian Institution, "Did You Know? Human Origins Facts", https://www.si.edu/stories/human-origins-facts (Homo sapiens evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago; humans using symbols to represent words and concepts around 8,000 years ago, with true writing developing over the next few thousand years).