How were writting systems developed? How we decided the characters and their meanings?
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The very earliest writing systems were not complete writing systems which recorded the spoken language, they were ideographic – where a symbol ($) represents an idea (the notion of money or dollars). You’re probably familiar with this idea if you’ve heard of how traditional Chinese characters work, or how Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs worked. There is also a theory that some early writing systems were mnemonic – similar to how shorthand or some kinds of musical notation work. If you need to memorize a super long chant for religious purposes, for example, you might develop a kind of writing that uses symbols to remind yourself of the sequence of words or sounds.
If you combine the two ideas together, you can start to see how writing developed. Some guys name is Khaleth so to remind himself, a scribe writes down the symbol for a cat (pronounced Kha) next to the symbol for rain (pronounced Lethe). Keep doing that for hundreds of years and you will have either developed a system where every word has a symbol (often as combinations of multiple symbols, like Chinese) or a system where symbols represent sounds instead of ideas
There’s still other evidence, though, that some cultures might have first invented writing for recording numbers – South American cultures, for example, had the Quipu system for encoding numbers, but no writing for recording their language.
We should also note here that inventing writing seems to be relatively difficult. It is known to have happened independently only four times – Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica. As far as we can tell, all other writing systems were developed with the knowledge of one of those four. Either most ancient cultures either didn’t have the socio-economic development that made writing necessary or apparent, or it’s that the chances of somebody developing writing in a world where no writing exists are just very very small.
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