Earliest alphabet
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"Oldest Alphabet Discovered in Ancient Syrian Tomb Redefines History of Writing", by Chrissy Newton, Debrief (November 21, 2024)
A research team at Johns Hopkins University has discovered evidence of the world’s oldest alphabetic writing, carved onto finger-length clay cylinders, outdating other scripts by 500 years.
Recovered during excavations in a tomb in Syria, the writing is believed to date to around 2400 BCE. This new finding disrupts how archaeologists understand where the alphabet originated, and how it was shared across civilizations, societies, and cultures, leaving anthropologists with new questions about what the findings mean for early urban civilizations.
“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders in a statement. “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,” he added. Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting.
The discovery was unearthed during excavation of tombs from the Early Bronze Age at Tell Umm-el Marra. Schwartz’s primary research focus involves the rise of early urban areas in Syria, focusing on how smaller cities emerged. In collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, he co-directed a 16-year excavation at the Tell Umm-el Marra site, one of western Syria’s first medium-sized urban centers.
Above: Clay objects roughly the size of fingers were discovered during a dig at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra. The engraved symbols may be part of the earliest known alphabet (Credit: Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University).
Among the most well-preserved tombs at the site had been one containing six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, spearheads, and intact pottery vessels. Near the area where the pottery was located, the archaeologists discovered four lightly baked clay cylinders inscribed with what appears to be early alphabetic writing.
Using carbon-14 dating techniques, the researchers were able to confirm the ages of the tombs and their associated artifacts. “The cylinders were perforated, so I’m imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label,” Schwartz said. “Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to.”
“Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate,” he added.
“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said.
“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.”
Selected readings
"The Origin(s) of Writing" (3/19/22)
- "'The world's oldest in-use writing system'?" (5/12/12)
- "Writing: from complex symbols to abstract squiggles" (6/11/19)
- "Tel Lachish and the origin of the alphabet" (4/26/21)
- "Tel Lachish and the origin of the alphabet" (12/27/21)
"Wheat and word: astronomy and the origins of the alphabet" (3/15/24)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Maurice Buxton said,
November 21, 2024 @ 5:04 pm
Erm … if they only have four of them with a few symbols each, and they don't correspond to anything recognisable, how on earth can they determine that they're an alphabet? (As opposed to some other kind of notational system.)
Jonathan Smith said,
November 21, 2024 @ 6:25 pm
This material was commented on here back in 2021 by Stephen Goranson
He linked to Christopher Rollston's blog post
More recently there is e.g. Richey 2023
so there appears to be a certain amount of opinion regarding these as likely representative of "Early Alphabetic." The shift in focus away from Sinai/Egypt is interesting… same could easily happen say tomorrow in Chinese given the right discovery away from the central Yellow River Valley.
Brian said,
November 21, 2024 @ 8:08 pm
This is good news, if, indeed, it's true (a few of those symbols do look similar — such as one resembling Qoph and one Yodh). As many have said, including Petrie and Moran, pre-alphabet [alphazodiac] signs can be found in Old Europe, and thus there's the strong possibility that it didn't originate in Egypt. For instance, in my first paper, SPP 196, I discuss pre-alphabetic symbols on a stag bone from Spain that is dated 4000-3800 BC. I also discuss the Karanovo zodiac that is dated 4800 B.C. And more recently in SPP 341, I discuss the Neolithic Tartaria and Gradeshnista Tablets, as well as NEWS, etc. But whether the first true alphabet/alphazodiac came out of Egypt or Syria/Mesopotamia is not as important at the underlying astro-theology/wheat cultivation symbols that have its origins thousands of years prior (many of which, as I have tried to show, form the foundation of much of the theology seen in the Celestial Diagrams of Egypt and the Proto-Sinaitic Script, as well as in the earlier symbols found in Mesopotamian Cylinder Seals, etc.). The exchange of ideas throughout Europe and Mesopotamia/Egypt was key. Thus, Moran's criteria for a theory for the development of the phonetic alphabet appears quite relevant: 1. “An organizing principle.” 2. “Great age.” 3.“Widespread distribution.” 4. “Correlation of form, meaning, and phonetic value.” And 5.“Constant order."
Victor Mair said,
November 21, 2024 @ 8:39 pm
"Mesopotamian seals and the birth of writing" (11/17/24) — with helpful bibliography
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=66964
See the second comment by Miriam Robbins Dexter, on Schmandt-Besserat's token thesis, the Danube Script (Vinča script), and bibliography thereon.
~flow said,
November 22, 2024 @ 9:31 am
I hope Mr D Eddyshaw won*t mind if I quote him here, in a commentary he made over at https://languagehat.com/oldest-alphabet/ which talks about this same press release:
> The stuff about the revolutionary consequences of alphabetic
> writing is fanciful. It is not borne out by the actual
> history of literacy: for example, there are huge numbers of
> surviving texts in Akkadian, which is vastly better attested
> in terms of sheer quantity than ancient
> alphabetically-written Canaanite languages. (And a syllabary
> would do just as well for democratising writing in many
> languages, anyway. If not better.)
I can only agree with this sentiment. I'm wondering what the confidence that these few marks constitute (part of) an alphabet is based on, and likewise I wonder what the statement that the alphabet "ma[de writing] accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite" is based on. I also wonder what similar statements about literacy rates in Ancient Egypt and Ancient China are based on (typically given as 1% in the former case). My observation is that some people in the workforce that built the Gizah pyramids left their graffiti in the boat pit and in the so-called relieving chambers, and that one of the (presumably many) overseer of a gang of men responsible for the transport of stones from Tura to Giza left us an orderly written diary of his work, and that some of the artists who decorated the many graves and temples of ancient Egypt were likewise literate, and that we have letters from the hands of rural business owners. 1%, really?
Peter Grubtal said,
November 23, 2024 @ 5:01 am
D Spart Eddyshaw sees things through his ideological glasses.
The corpus of cuneiform texts accumulated over 3 millennia, and the survival of much of it we owe to one ruler with bookish and antiquarian interests : Assurbanipal. Competence in cuneiform required to some extent knowledge of extinct Sumerian, and although, as with ancient Egyptian, that doesn't exclude that people other than the priestly elite acquired some degree of literacy in it, it must have been considerably more difficult than with an alphabet or syllabary.
Sean said,
November 23, 2024 @ 2:50 pm
There is a school of thought that literacy in the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian period was about as common as in Julio-Claudian Italy eg. Claus Wilcke, Wer las und schrieb in Babylonien und Assyrien: Überlegungen zur Literalität im Alten Zweistromland (2000). Cuneiform is difficult but not nearly as hard to learn as Chinese characters and the abjads have their quirks (eg. Akkadian often stores information in word-initial short vowels which you can't mark in an ancient abjad).
Andreas Johansson said,
November 25, 2024 @ 3:56 am
The main reason for there being more cuneiform than early alphabetic (abjadic) texts around is surely that the former were commonly written on clay tablets and the latter not.