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"Nothing" as a concept always existed of course. But it wasn't considered a number, generally. Certainly no one counted "nothing, one, two", and even today natural language doesn't include "nothing" or some equivalent as a numeral noun.

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You need to be careful about the phrase “considered a number” since I believe one, or unity, was also not considered a number by some ancient civilisation - i.e. a number was only multiple copies of unity.

[I believe this YouTube video goes into more detail in its discussion of why 1 was not considered Prime in the ancient world: https://youtu.be/R33RoMO6xeA]

That's where I'm quite skeptical. Imagine you are in charge of trade or rationing important village resources in the winter. It just seems to me almost necessary that people would have a way to symbolically indicate that all the sheep are gone. As opposed to just not having any symbol for that at all.

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