Archaeologists unearthed possible alphabetic writings significantly older than any others ever found. Archaeologists discovered this in 2004 at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra, in the northwest of present-day Syria.
Alphabetic scripts are writing systems where the characters or symbols represent a phoneme, or more simply, a sound. “Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, a Near Eastern archaeologist, who was a part of the 2004 dig at Umm el-Marra, “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.”
The alphabetic characters were written on cylindrical clay objects about the size of a finger. These clay cylinders have been carbon dated to the Early Bronze Age, around 2400 BCE. Prior to this find, scholars believed that alphabetic writing emerged in Egypt around 1900 BCE. If the symbols on the clay cylinders truly are alphabetic, then alphabets may have originated 500 years before and over 1000 kilometres away from what was previously suggested.
Schwartz and his team found the clay cylinders in a tomb next to pottery vessels, among many other artifacts, including six skeletons, and gold and silver jewellery. The tomb is part of a complex of several tombs. The tombs probably belonged to the elite of Umm el-Marra because of the accompanying artifacts, such as jewellery and what are thought to be the skeletons of Kungas, a form of donkey hybrid that was valuable at the time of the tombs’ construction.
Schwartz suggested that the clay cylinders may have been labels. He stated “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.” He continued, “Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”
Glenn Schwartz presented his discoveries at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting in late November 2024.
Sources:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/oldest-alphabet-writing-syria
https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/13/alphabetic-writing-500-years-earlier-glenn-schwartz
https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/11/21/ancient-alphabet-discovered-syria
https://neareast.jhu.edu/directory/glenn-m-schwartz
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/ummelmarra/
https://www.asor.org/news/2021/08/seger-grant-report-schwartz
https://www.snexplores.org/article/kunga-donkey-wild-ass-hybrid-biology
https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing/Types-of-writing-systems