The meaning of the word "history" is the study of historical records. The events that happened in times before writing are called "pre-history", and similarly the events that happened in places that didn't write things down are out of scope.
History has never been purely about studying literary records. Thucydides' History includes gratuitous use of oral speeches and discussion of events that predate writing. I can't think of a single modern historian who doesn't make use of archaeological data either.
Equating history with writing is a very anachronistic definition that was popular among Renaissance and early modern historians as a way of legitimizing their preference for classical scholarship over the "dark" middle ages. It's not a good rule of thumb for what is or isn't historical.
What I'm saying is there are records that have either been ignored, neglected, or destroyed.
In Mali alone there are millions of historical documents [1] that have not been suitable explored. The Meroitic [2] script that contains historical records is still poorly understood
