Your own cultural writing instrument

Do you know what was the native writing instrument of your culture?

The ubiquitous ballpoint pen was an invention of the 20th century.

Prior to that, the fountain pen of Europe had become the most widely used writing instrument in the world.

However, the non-European cultures with literacy development has their own native writing instruments.

The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans etc use the ink-brush.

The Middle East use the qalam.

Prior to the fountain pen, Europeans used quills.

At first, I used to wonder why the interaction between cultures in the past did not lead to a standard writing instrument.  After all, the purpose of the writing instrument was to put ink onto paper/parchment/papyrus in certain patterns legible to the respective language, right?

So it's not really a matter of raw materials being available.

The bamboo used by the East Asians may not be available in European, but that shouldn't really be problem.

Similarly, there's really no shortage of birds to produce suitable feathers for making quills in Asia either.

Then I realised that the respective cultures retain their own native writing instrument for a good reason - it was most suitable for their own writing! (i.e., until the development of the ballpoint pen).

For the Chinese, their writing is composed of hieroglyphs, or pictograms. To put it another way, their writing is similar to drawing, and thus the ink-brush was the most suitable tool. The European quills could not produce the same type of elegant effects.

Similarly, the ink-brush was accepted as painting tool but the Europeans could hardly use it for writing. The Europeans might be able to use the  qalam used in Arabic calligraphy though, since their writings were both alphabet based.

Are there any other historical writing instruments?

Or, would you like to introduce your own, and explain how your native cultural writing instrument is linked to the writings in your own native languages?