Bronze Age
Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing. According to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia (cuneiform script) and Egypt (hieroglyphs) developed the earliest viable writing systems.
The overall period is characterized by widespread use of bronze, though the place and time of the introduction and development of bronze technology were not universally synchronous. Human-made tin bronze technology requires set production techniques. Tin must be mined (mainly as the tin ore cassiterite) and smelted separately, then added to molten copper to make bronze alloy. The Bronze Age was a time of extensive use of metals and of developing trade networks (See "Tin sources and trade in ancient times"). A 2013 report suggests that the earliest tin-alloy bronze dates to the mid-5th millennium BC in a Vinča culture site in Pločnik (Serbia), although this culture is not conventionally considered part of the Bronze Age. The dating of the foil has been disputed.
Early Indian epigraphy
The earliest traces of epigraphy in the Indian Subcontinent are found in the undeciphered inscriptions of the Indus Valley Civilization (Indus script), which date back to the early 3rd millennium BC. Two other important archeological classes of symbols are found from the 1st millennium BCE, Megalithic Graffiti Symbols and symbols on punch-marked coins, though most scholars do not consider these to constitute fully linguistic scripts, and their semiotic functions are not well understood. The earliest deciphered epigraphic inscriptions of significant length are the Edicts of Ashoka of the 3rd century BCE, written in forms of Prakrit in the Brahmi script. Samanam inscriptions in South India written in Tamil-Brahmi, Bhattiprolu alphabet and the Kadamba alphabet are also of relatively early date. Some Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions discovered at Palani, Erode, and Adichanallur, have been claimed to be as ancient as 500 BCE, but so far only the claimed pre-Ashokan inscriptions at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka have been published academically.