Do all modern writing systems descend from cuneiform and Chinese proto-glyphs? If not, what other writing systems evolved independently that are still in use?

No problem!

I personally find the Indus Valley Civilization fascinating because we know so little about them. Even archaeologically, only a tiny fraction of sites have been thoroughly studied. But we know they must’ve been hugely influential right at the dawn of civilization.

The quipu are another instance where it’s unknown whether they’d constitute “writing” since they’ve never been deciphered. (And unfortunately, they almost certainly never will be.) But firsthand accounts by Spanish colonists seem to indicate they may have been used more as memory-joggers or to encode strings of numbers. Nowadays it’s generally considered highly unlikely that they could communicate entire sentences word-for-word.

For pre-Colombian America, the only true writing system was by the Maya. The Aztec system doesn’t count, because it only loosely conveys proper nouns through pictographs and illustrations.

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