Found etched into clay cylinders in Syria, the strange symbols date to around 2400 B.C.E. That is 500 years before other known alphabetic scripts.
Twenty years ago, researchers discovered four small clay cylinders marked with strange symbols at an ancient tomb in Syria. They’ve now concluded that those symbols are letters - and they may be the world’s oldest known evidence of alphabetic writing.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam found the marked cylinders in 2004, and Johns Hopkins archaeologist Glenn Schwartz described them in a paper in 2021. But they didn’t attract widespread attention until last week, when Schwartz presented it at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.
The Sumerians of Mesopotamia built a language from cuneiforms, or small images, thousands of years ago. The Ancient Egyptians developed hieroglyphics, and Chinese characters built the written language piece by piece. Alphabetic language, or written language made of individual phonemes (distinct units of sound), is a newer invention, but now, archaeologists believe they have discovered the “oldest known alphabet” ever found.
Scholars have long thought that the alphabet was invented in Proto-Sinaitic script, which transformed some hieroglyphs into alphabetic letters, and emerged in the Sinai Peninsula around 1900 B.C.E.. “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,” says Schwartz.
Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that the cylinders were made around 2400 B.C.E., which would make them about 500 years older than other known alphabetic scripts. If the cylinders’ markings are alphabetic letters, they represent a pivotal shift in humans’ development of language.
Schwartz says older writing systems could feature thousands of characters or symbols representing full words, syllables or combinations of phonemes - “the smallest sound segments that languages have.” Alphabetic systems are much simpler: They contain only 20 to 30 characters, “since that’s the usual maximum number of phonemes a language will use.”
“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” says Schwartz. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”