From what I’ve seen, writing was independently invented somewhere between 3 to 6 times. With so many languages and linguistic communities, why have so few independently invented writing?

  • Just to build on that, writing is only really useful if lots of people can do it. And the most obvious type of system, logographic, takes a lot of work to learn even after the work of developing it. So I can see how it would be a hard sell until you meet a culture that already uses it to great effect.