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My take on why the development of writing is associated with states:
Every 'pristine' writing system has started with pictographs and then advanced to some sort of logographs + rebus principle. Functional, but very complex, almost a second language to learn, and thus needing specialist scribes or a modern commitment and capacity for mass education. Which means, if not requiring a state per se, requiring a societal size and complexity that also gives you a state in practice.
(Such systems often spin off something simpler, like hiragana or what became the Phoenician abjad, but that almost never displaces elite writing in the original society[1], though it may be taken up by foreigners for their own use.)
A syllabary or alphabetic system is simple enough that people in a 'simple' tribe could easily pass it on to their children, for use in markers or letters or household notes. But no one sits down and develops a phonemic analysis of their language from scratch. The closest is Sequoyah creating the Cherokee syllabary, and that took 12 years of crazy intense work driven by already knowing that European writing existed and was useful, years in which he ended up recapitulating the pictograph -> logograph -> syllabary development.
So you could have literate hunter-gatherers or simple farming communities, but based on historical models they would never develop writing from scratch, because the path always goes through a really complex phase that they can't support.
[1] An exception being Korean hangul, which did mostly displace Chinese characters in South Korea -- nearly 500 years after its development by an actual king, and under the extreme pressures of modernization.
Every 'pristine' writing system has started with pictographs and then advanced to some sort of logographs + rebus principle. Functional, but very complex, almost a second language to learn, and thus needing specialist scribes or a modern commitment and capacity for mass education. Which means, if not requiring a state per se, requiring a societal size and complexity that also gives you a state in practice.
(Such systems often spin off something simpler, like hiragana or what became the Phoenician abjad, but that almost never displaces elite writing in the original society[1], though it may be taken up by foreigners for their own use.)
A syllabary or alphabetic system is simple enough that people in a 'simple' tribe could easily pass it on to their children, for use in markers or letters or household notes. But no one sits down and develops a phonemic analysis of their language from scratch. The closest is Sequoyah creating the Cherokee syllabary, and that took 12 years of crazy intense work driven by already knowing that European writing existed and was useful, years in which he ended up recapitulating the pictograph -> logograph -> syllabary development.
So you could have literate hunter-gatherers or simple farming communities, but based on historical models they would never develop writing from scratch, because the path always goes through a really complex phase that they can't support.
[1] An exception being Korean hangul, which did mostly displace Chinese characters in South Korea -- nearly 500 years after its development by an actual king, and under the extreme pressures of modernization.