Phonetic writing was created for the first time at the beginning of the scientific revolution as a more versatile version of the numeral systems and semi-phonetic runes that had been used for most of history.
What if writing was invented much earlier -- at around the time that farming, animal husbandry, and city-states became commonplace?
Off the top of my head, there might be an elite "scribe" class that recorded knowledge. Religions might have "holy books" to delineate their doctrines. History would be written down, rather than preserved only as oral legends and myths, that we can test with archaeology but never know for certain.