Alphabets is perhaps 500 years older than beforehand believed, in response to a not too long ago printed research by a Johns Hopkins College archaeologist.
Throughout a 2004 dig of a tomb within the historical metropolis of Umm el-Marra in northern Syria, Glenn Schwartz and a workforce of researchers found 4 small clay cylinders, every bearing a collection of inscribed characters.
Twenty years later, Schwartz argued that these artifacts, roughly 4 to 5 centimeters in size (~1.6 inches) and relationship to round 2400 BCE, may signify 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 in the course of 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 response to 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 moderately a set of characters denoting syllables.
Schwartz defined that the clay cylinders resemble beads, which may imply they have been strung collectively to perform 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 techniques, like hieroglyphs, suggesting that an authentic alphabet had fashioned at Umm el-Marra’s temple advanced. Explaining that an alphabet could have fashioned within the historical metropolis to deal with growing administrative wants, Schwartz invited philologists to decode its that 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.”
