Writing has been independently invented a number of times, and appears to be so commonplace that it wouldn't be surprising to find that most of the writing systems ever devised have been lost, and probably so long ago even the folklore (or possibly just the population that used it) has vanished.
In her Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology, Mary Settegast reproduces a table which shows four runic character sets; a is Upper Paleolithic (found among the cave paintings), b is Indus Valley script, c is Greek (western branch), and d is the Scandinavian runic alphabet.
