Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Archaeologists have found the world’s oldest evidence of alphabetic writing in an ancient Syrian tomb, challenging previous conceptions about the origin of alphabets.
The findings, presented at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting this week, show the writing, etched into finger-length clay cylinders, dates to about 2400 BCE. This precedes any other known examples of alphabetic scripts by about 500 years.
Humans had developed writing before alphabets.
The earliest ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs date to about 5,200 years ago. Slightly older is the first cuneiform text – the Kish tablet – found in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk in modern southern Iraq, inscribed in about 3400 BCE.
Archaeologists have even found evidence of proto-cuneiform from 6,000 years ago, also at Uruk.
Alphabetic writing represented the shift to phonographic systems – writing where letters represent sounds in a language, rather than pictographs or symbols representing words or ideas. Some early cuneiform was partially phonological.
“Alphabets revolutionised writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” says the discoverer of the clay cylinders Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University in the US. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”
“And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”
Schwartz’s team found the inscribed clay cylinders in Tell Umm-el Marra – one of the first medium-sized urban centres in western Syria.
The 16-year dig uncovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age.
One tomb contained 6 skeletons, gold and silver jewellery, cookware, a spearhead, and intact pottery vessels. The clay cylinders were found next to the pottery.
“The cylinders were perforated, so I’m imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label. Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to,” Schwartz explains. “Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”
Radiocarbon dating confirmed the tombs, artifacts and writing are about 4,400 years old.
“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz says. “But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”
