Oldest known alphabet discovered in ancient Syrian city

What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetical writing in human history is carved into finger-length clay cylinders, extracted from a tomb in Syria by a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University.

The writing, dated to around 2400 BCE, predates other known alphabetic scripts by around 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about the origin of alphabets, how they are shared between societies and what this might mean for the first urban civilizations.

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the social elite. Alphabetical writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, an archeology professor at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay. cylinders. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different place than we previously imagined.”

Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, November 21, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.

A Near Eastern archaeologist, Schwartz studies how early urban areas developed throughout Syria and how smaller cities emerged in the region. With colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, he co-led archaeological excavations at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-sized urban centers in western Syria, for 16 years.

In Umm-el Marra, archaeologists have discovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age. One of the best-preserved tombs contained six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cooking utensils, a spearhead, and intact pottery vessels. Next to the pottery, researchers found four lightly fired clay cylinders on which there appeared to be alphabetical writing.

“The cylinders were perforated, so I imagine a string attaching them to another object to serve as a label. Maybe they detail the contents of a container, or maybe where the container came from, or who it belonged to,” Schwartz said. . “Without a way to translate the written word, we can only speculate.”

Using carbon-14 dating techniques, researchers confirmed the ages of tombs, artifacts and writings.

“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “But our artifacts are older and come from a different area on the map, suggesting that the alphabet might have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”