The current best evidence seems to be that the Futhark runes are a development of Northern Italian scripts, from somewhen about 400 BC to 100 BC. As there was extensive trade between the North and Baltic seas and the Mediterranean during the Neolithic period, this was well after initial contact.
Peter Metcalfe says:
> Korean Hangul was also invented before the Europeans
>came.
The current Korean script was invented after European contact, because the Koreans recognized the superiority of the alphabetic paradigm over Chinese. I don't know of a Korean form before that; my understanding is that they used Chinese, much as Europeans used Latin even after the spoken languages diverged completely from the Latin of Cicero and Caesar.
Likewise, Sequoia invented Cherokee from the idea of European writing, rather than any particular knowledge, except for the shapes of cheaply available type. None of the letters sound anything like their English versions.
Other than these two cases, all alphabetic scripts seem to be developed from the Phoenician/Demotic base, primarily because it spread out to other cultures like wildfire on bills of lading of merchants, rather than remaining a secret of priests.
I thus expect that modern Orlanthi scripts are all based on Malkioni, but that certain of the letters (the eigen-runes of GodLearner fame) are also used for religious iconography. I expect that this is even more the case in Umathela. It may be the case for Fonrit, as well, or their script may be from an earlier Artmali script, but they will be used alphabetically, not logographically, or even syllabic.
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