Japanese word for a specific definition of "writing"

Question

I had been thinking about the invention of writing in human history when I realised I didn't know its Japanese translation. What would be the closest word for the following definition of "writing":

Writing is a medium of human communication that involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols... - [1]

I have come across 筆記 and 執筆, but judging from their dictionary and Wikipedia entries, 筆記 seems to be the closest one [2].

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References:

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing
• [2] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/筆記

Answer 1

As mentioned by @sundowner in the comments, 文字 is the word I was looking for.

I corroborated the claim by googling up 文字歴史, getting the answers one would expect from "the history of writing".