Archaeologists May Have Just Found the Oldest Alphabet Ever

Between 1994 and 2010, American and Dutch archaeologists excavated an Early Bronze Age tract eastbound of Aleppo, Syria. In a well-preserved tomb, they recovered skeletons, golden and metallic jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and pottery. Next to the pottery, however, they uncovered thing perchance much invaluable than everything other combined: 4 4,400-year-old clay cylinders etched with what seems to beryllium an alphabet.

Now, Glenn Schwartz, the Johns Hopkins University archaeologist who made the discovery, is claiming that the 4 finger-length artifacts mightiness beryllium the oldest known grounds of alphabetic penning successful history. If this assessment, elaborate successful a November 20 assemblage statement and announced astatine the American Society of Overseas Research‘s Annual Meeting the pursuing day, is correct, it would disrupt erstwhile assumptions astir the root and dispersed of the archetypal known alphabet.

“Alphabets revolutionized penning by making it accessible to radical beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic penning changed the mode radical lived, however they thought, however they communicated,” Schwartz said successful the statement. “And this caller find shows that radical were experimenting with caller connection technologies overmuch earlier and successful a antithetic determination than we had imagined earlier now.”

The 4 clay cylinders are inscribed with what mightiness beryllium the oldest known grounds of alphabetic writing. Image: Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University

Scholars person debated the root of the archetypal alphabet for years, but astir of them hold that the archetypal known alphabet was developed successful the archetypal fractional of the 2nd millennium BCE. The caller uncovering could alteration this. Carbon dating—a tried-and-true method for dating integrated matter—placed the tiny cylinders to astir 2400 BCE, predating that timeline by astir 500 years.

“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented successful oregon astir Egypt sometime aft 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “But our artifacts are older and from a antithetic country connected the map, suggesting the alphabet whitethorn person an wholly antithetic root communicative than we thought.”

The uncovering came wrong the discourse of a associated Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam excavation astatine Tell Umm-el Marra, an municipality colony founded astir 2700 BCE successful modern-day occidental Syria suspected of being the past metropolis of Tuba.

“The cylinders were perforated, truthful I’m imagining a drawstring tethering them to different entity to enactment arsenic a label. Maybe they item the contents of a vessel, oregon possibly wherever the vas came from, oregon who it belonged to,” Schwartz said. “Without a means to construe the writing, we tin lone speculate.”

The uncovering has the imaginable to upend established archaeological assumptions astir the root of the oldest known alphabet, and with it the commencement of important developments that followed, including much businesslike record-keeping and long-distance communication.