Weird how that list doesn't include the state, coinage, or farming. Or animal domestication. Or smelting iron. Or steam engines and machine tools.
Computers are basically irrelevant but networking would be huge - being able to communicate near-instantly across large distances was possibly the single biggest limiting factor for the size of empires in agrarian societies (other than food).
Writing doesn't do as much as you'd think for long-term fixed preservation of knowledge. It sure helps, but 1) oral teachings exist and useful practices are passed down whether or not they're written, and 2) at the end of the day books need to be constantly rewritten as they wear out, and ancient libraries burned down all the time.
In terms of building a civilisation in the first place, animal husbandry is vastly more useful than writing because writing is something scribes do (i.e. your non-farming elite - in medieval times, more than 9/10 of the population were farmers, and prehistorical farming was likely far less efficient than medieval farming what with the lack of iron etc), and animal husbandry improves your agriculture dramatically and are a major factor in providing the food-surplus for those scribes to exist in the first place.
In fact, particularly food-poor empires tend to be conquered by more food-rich empires that can field larger armies, so if your hypothetical has-writing empire fought my hypothetical has-animals empire then I expect mine would win. Especially since your army wouldn't have cavalry or charioteers.
>being able to communicate near-instantly across large distances was possibly the single biggest limiting factor for the size of empires in agrarian societies
Seemingly, yes, but this hasn't been proven quite yet. The American empire appears to be losing dominance since the proliferation of the internet, for example. However, the American empire certainly gained tremendous power from broadcasted electronic mediums.
I would argue that convincingly unfaked communication is more important than fast communication.
America gained cultural power over the world by making most of the worlds films. But if those films took a year to arrive in Turkmenistan, it wouldn't diminish the power of that culture over the people.
However, if rather than a film arriving, it was a guy on horseback who had heard legend of someone who had once seen an American film, then it would probably have little impact.
The emergence of the state probably could not have happened without writing. Steam engines and machine tools could not have happened without the printing press. Networking (telegraph) was the predecessor technology of computers.
>The emergence of the state probably could not have happened without writing.
Empirically speaking the opposite is more likely - writing emerged from state accountants keeping records of grain etc. Writing was independently invented by several states across the globe, in fact.
>Steam engines and machine tools could not have happened without the printing press.
Why's that?
This is a very hard subject to discuss, because steam engines and the industrial revolution (I mean precisely the shift from an agrarian economy to a mineral economy, i.e. the switch to using non-living energy sources) happened exactly once, in the UK, and spread worldwide from there. It's hard to extrapolate from a dataset of one.
However, from what I understand of the industrial revolution, it didn't strictly require the printing press - the core driver was of needing to extract coal from a deep coal mine that was flooded; because the coal mine produced a bunch of low-grade coal that was disposed of onsite by burning it (because it was too crappy to be worth the transport costs of selling it) the efficiency of the steam engine didn't matter because the fuel was free.
There were a bunch of implicit requirements (the obvious one being the demand for coal) that are extensively debated, and while we could speculate the printing press was helpful in some way, I don't see any reason why a printing press would be a hard-requirement.
>Networking (telegraph) was the predecessor technology of computers.
The Antikythera mechanism predates the telegraph by millennia. Computing was orthogonal to networking for the majority of its history.
Computers are basically irrelevant but networking would be huge - being able to communicate near-instantly across large distances was possibly the single biggest limiting factor for the size of empires in agrarian societies (other than food).