An observation-it seems that the idea of writing has appeared many times. The Maya, and likely the Near Easterners & Chinese stumbled upon the concept without outside input (there is a possibility that the Chinese were influenced by western Eurasia). Chinese writing comes from oracle bones & Near Eastern writing from the clay token accounting system, not quite the original idea that characters developed from pictures. The Inca with their quipu account system would probably have also advanced to literacy. On the other hand, phonetic script, which makes writing more than the preserve of scribes, seems to have been invented just once among the Aramaeans and Phonecians [1]. It spread by cultural diffusion from one end of Eurasia to the other by a chain so that Mongolian, Khmer and the Latin script all share a common ancestor amogn the city-states of Syria [2].
[1] The transition from the more archaic written systems to the alphabet was a quantum leap in efficiency. Likewise, the introduction of the codex, paper and finally the printing press has made universal literacy a possibility. Scribes of Sumeria were more like the rocket scientists of their day, dealers in a rare and precious art that required years of study of arcana.
[2] Mongolian was forced to become Cyrillic, and I now believe it is Latin, but its original script came from the Uighers (who I assume now use Arabic, though I’m not sure).
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