China, Egypt, Aztecs, Myans - did not create a lasting empire to dominate the world.
Not saying that paper was/is not important but if what you put on it are glyphs & icons whose meaning are transient at times and difficult to effectively learn, it's still not that much of an advantage.
How about a manual typewriter with 50k keys for Chinese?
You need to brush up on your history.
The Chinese Empire lasted for thousands of years and, at it's peak controlled more people and land then did Rome. Certainly in the invention area it dominated the world.
While the Egyptian Empire was not as large it also lasted for over a thousand years and certainly did dominate culturally.
The Roman Empire does not even make the top ten of empires that dominated the world.
It is just the one that we tend to study the most.