November 22, 2024
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World’s oldest alphabet discovered in ancient clay gift tags
A finger-sized clay cylinder unearthed from a tomb in northern Syria appears to be the earliest example of writing using an alphabet rather than hieroglyphics or cuneiform.
Clay objects discovered during excavations in the ancient city of Umm el Mara were inscribed with symbols that may be part of the oldest known alphabet.
Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University (CC by)
Researchers may have deciphered the oldest alphabetic letter fragment ever discovered, and it could be a nearly 4,500-year-old gift tag.
A clay cylinder found in a tomb containing the remains of six people in northern Syria was engraved with the word “Siranu,” suggesting a possible name, said Johns Hopkins University archaeologist Glenn Schwartz. It is said that there is a sex. Schwartz identified the finger-sized column and three other columns with similar etchings in a tomb in the ancient city of Tell Umm el Mara, located between present-day Aleppo and the Euphrates River. I discovered it.
The alphabet divides words into single vowels and consonants and usually requires only 20 to 40 characters. This makes the alphabet system more streamlined and easier to learn than previous writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform. These systems used hundreds of symbols that primarily represented words and syllables rather than individual sounds. Scientists previously believed that the first alphabets were created around 1900 B.C. by Semitic-speaking people in what is now Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Its alphabet, called Proto-Sinaitic, is based on hieroglyphics that were reused as writing. If anything, this new discovery suggests that people in more distant parts of the Near East were experimenting with hieroglyphic-derived writing much earlier.
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“It changes the whole story of how the alphabet was introduced,” Schwartz said. A small hole drilled into the cylinder may have been used to thread thread through the cylinder. Therefore, the clay structures may have served as labels for goods. Schwartz said Shinar may have been the recipient or sender of some of the jars of food and drink placed in graves to transport the occupants to the afterlife. This tomb probably belongs to a wealthy and powerful family in the city.
This finger-sized clay cylinder discovered in the tomb of Umm el Mara may contain the letters of the oldest known alphabet.
Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University (CC by)
Archaeologists first discovered the column in 2004, and radiocarbon analysis dated the clay to around 2400 BC. In 2021, Schwartz described the column in an Italian magazine. Pasiphae. This study did not receive much attention, in part because Schwartz was wary of interpreting the inscriptions as alphabetic letters. “I was probably too timid,” he says.
He offered a more confident interpretation this week at the American Overseas Research Association’s annual meeting in Boston. Some researchers, who were only able to obtain a few snapshots of the cylinder before the talk, said they expected further evidence that the inscription represents an alphabet rather than another type of writing system. “When you have only a small number of very short inscriptions, it can be difficult to determine how many symbols there are in a system,” says Philippa Steele, a senior research fellow in classics at the University of Cambridge. With so few traces to study, it’s difficult to be sure whether the new etchings really match the known Proto-Sinaitic script, she says. “I think we should expect more discoveries,” she says.
Others are convinced too. “It’s an alphabet,” says Silvia Ferrara, an early language researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy who was not involved in the study. “That’s easy. Easy. I’m used to tougher things.”
“The morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals is very similar to the morphology of existing corpora of early alphabetic writings,” said Christopher Rolston, professor of Biblical and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at George Washington University. added. Although he was a researcher, he studied under Schwartz as a graduate student.
The developers of the first alphabets were once thought to have lived in Egyptian society, but Egyptians and Syrians have extensive trade networks, and many people around the Middle East are familiar with the Egyptian writing system. Ferrara says it’s likely that he did.
“It’s not that surprising when you know how far and wide these objects traveled,” she says.
