Alphabets is perhaps 500 years older than beforehand believed, in accordance with a lately revealed research by a Johns Hopkins College archaeologist.
Throughout a 2004 dig of a tomb within the historic metropolis of Umm el-Marra in northern Syria, Glenn Schwartz and a crew of researchers found 4 small clay cylinders, every bearing a sequence of inscribed characters.
Twenty years later, Schwartz argued that these artifacts, roughly 4 to 5 centimeters in size (~1.6 inches) and courting to round 2400 BCE, might characterize the world’s oldest alphabetic writing system. Beforehand, students believed that the primary alphabet was a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Egypt earlier than 1900 BCE.
Throughout a November presentation of his findings on the annual assembly of the American Society of Abroad Analysis in Boston, shared with Hyperallergic, Schwartz mentioned that cuneiform was beforehand the one writing system accounted for in Syria throughout the Early Bronze Age when the cylinders are believed to have been inscribed.
Schwartz found the artifacts in 2004 however has not offered them broadly till now.
The symbols carved into the artifacts are distinct from characters related to cuneiform, in accordance with Schwartz, suggesting a brand new type of writing fully. Whereas cuneiform is taken into account the world’s oldest writing system, having emerged earlier than 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia, it’s neither an alphabet nor a language however fairly a set of characters denoting syllables.
Schwartz defined that the clay cylinders resemble beads, which might imply they have been strung collectively to operate as a tag within the Umm el-Marra tomb.
One image carved into the clay is a circle with two dots, which seems on two of the cylinders. That recurrence, Schwartz mentioned, strengthens the case that the symbols are literally alphabetic writing.
“The longer the sequence of symbols, the more likely that writing is involved,” Schwartz mentioned, distinguishing alphabetic writing from semasiography, which refers to “signs functioning as mnemonic devices to represent ideas but not language.”
The small cylinders are about 1 centimeter (~0.4 inches) thick.
He added that characters from the clay fragments don’t convincingly match different writing programs, like hieroglyphs, suggesting that an unique alphabet had fashioned at Umm el-Marra’s temple complicated. Explaining that an alphabet could have fashioned within the historic metropolis to deal with growing administrative wants, Schwartz invited philologists to decode its which means.
“Writing often appears when a complex, urban society develops, which was certainly the case in the third millennium northern Levant,” Schwartz mentioned in his remarks. “If the Umm el-Marra cylinders are tags or labels, this would be consistent with the association of writing with increasing administrative needs.”
