Imagine writing a gift tag, only for it to be discovered and marvelled at thousands of years later. Recently, at the American Society of Overseas Research meeting held in Boston, archaeologists presented evidence for the world’s oldest writing on a clay cylinder found in a 4,400-year-old Syrian tomb. The cylinder, described as an ancient gift tag, bore the word “Silanu,” which researchers speculate could be a name. This discovery was revolutionary as it both showed signs of humans experimenting with communication technologies and also showed a different perspective that the word may be alphabetic letters rather than another type of writing system.

Typically, alphabets break words into single vowels and consonants, and require only 20 to 40 characters. This made the alphabetic systems easier to learn than the writing systems that came before—Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. Scientists previously thought that the first alphabet in the world was created around 1900 B.C.E. by people speaking a Semitic language on the Sinai Peninsula in what is now Egypt. That alphabet, called Proto-Sinaitic, is based on hieroglyphic symbols repurposed as letters. The recent finding of the clay cylinder suggests instead that people in farther-flung reaches of the Near East experimented with hieroglyph-derived letters much earlier. “It changes the entire narrative of how the alphabet was introduced,” says Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at John Hopkins University. Before the discovery we thought that other writing systems and alphabets like the Egyptian hieroglyphs were the first alphabets, although that all changed due to the discovery.

Archaeologists originally first found the cylinders in 2004, and in 2021, Schwartz described the cylinders to an Italian Journal called Pasiphae. However, the research didn’t get a lot of attention, mainly because Schwartz was too afraid to push his interpretation of the inscriptions as alphabetical letters. “I was too timid,” Schwartz explains. But in November of 2024, he presented a more confident interpretation at the American Society of Overseas Research in Boston, and at the conference, his research gained attention, raising light to the potentially new alphabet.

The researchers who had access to the snapshots of inscriptions at the meeting stated that they were looking forward to more evidence that the inscriptions represent an alphabet rather than another writing system. “When you only have a few very short inscriptions, it can be difficult to tell how many signs the system has,” says Philippa Steele, a senior researcher in classics at the University of Cambridge. With so few signs to work from, it’s hard to be sure that the new etchings match up with known Proto-Sinaitic writing rather than resemble it by coincidence. “I think we have to hope for more finds.” This is already a huge step forward from 2021, when the discovery hadn’t been given attention, and with more evidence and finds to come, to back up Schwartz’s theory, we will only see the alphabet gain more light.

This discovery is revolutionary. Although more evidence will be needed to support Schwartz’s theory, it is good that the project is being given more attention than it was previously. While the exact nature of the inscriptions remains uncertain, the possibility that they represent an early form of alphabetic writing opens up exciting avenues for further research.