This has been a question sitting on the edge of my mind for a while, and I have no idea how to begin searching for an answer.
I understand that this is an unscientific extension of my own thoughts to others, but I feel as though the concept of a "nothing" is something which ought to be innately understand as the difference between something being, and something not. Math seems to be so strongly representative to me that I have difficulty understanding how cultures that utilized math lacked a mathematical representation for 0.
They might have used something else, but I have no idea. Maybe mathematical representations represent things that "are," and the way of representing things that "are not," or nothing, is to just not represent them.
Help.
Sumerian scribes used spaces to denote absences in number columns as early as 4,000 years ago. Or sometimes they used a pair of angled wedges to mean nothing.
This article tells more.