November 22, 2024
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The world’s oldest alphabet found on a clay gift tag
A finger-sized clay cylinder from a tomb in northern Syria appears to be the earliest example of writing using an alphabet rather than hieroglyphics or cuneiform.
Clay objects found during an excavation in the ancient city of Umm el-Marra were engraved with symbols that may be part of the first known alphabet.
Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University (by CC)
Researchers may have deciphered the oldest piece of alphabetic writing yet found, and it could be a nearly 4,500-year-old gift tag.
A clay cylinder found in a grave containing six skeletons in northern Syria bears the word “silanu,” which could be a name, Johns Hopkins University archaeologist Glenn Schwartz says. Schwartz found the finger-sized cylinder, along with three others with similar engravings, in a tomb at Tell Umm el-Marra, an ancient city between present-day Aleppo and the Euphrates River.
Alphabets divide words single vowels and consonants and usually only needs 20 to 40 characters. This makes alphabetic systems simpler and easier to learn than earlier writing systems…Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. Those systems used hundreds of symbols, mostly representing words and syllables rather than individual sounds. Scientists believed that the first alphabet was created around 1900 BC by people in the Sinai Peninsula who spoke a Semitic language in present-day Egypt. This alphabet, known as Proto-Sinaitic, is based on hieroglyphic symbols recreated as letters. The new discovery suggests instead that people in far-flung parts of the Middle East experimented with letters derived from hieroglyphics much earlier.
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“It changes the whole narrative the alphabet was introduced,” says Schwartz. Small holes drilled in the cylinders could have been used to attach them to the string. Thus, the clay structure could have served as a label for goods; Sinalu could have been the recipient or sender of some of the food and drink jars placed in the tomb for its occupants to pass on to the afterlife, Schwartz says. The tomb he probably belonged to a rich and powerful family in the city.
This finger-sized clay cylinder found in a tomb at Umm el-Marra may contain letters from the oldest known alphabet.
Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University (by CC)
Archaeologists first discovered the cylinders in 2004, and radiocarbon analysis indicated the clay was from around 2400 Ka. In 2021, Schwartz described the cylinders in an Italian journal. Pasiphae. The study did not receive much attention, in part because Schwartz was cautious in pushing the interpretation of the inscriptions as alphabetic letters. “I was probably too shy,” he says.
He presented a more confident interpretation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research in Boston this week. Some researchers, who had access to only a few photographs of the cylinders before the lecture, said they expected more evidence that the inscriptions represent an alphabet rather than another type. writing system. “When you only have a few very short inscriptions, it can be difficult to know how many signs the system has,” says Philippa Steele, a senior researcher in classics at the University of Cambridge. With so few signs to work with, he says, it’s difficult to be sure that the new engravings actually match the known Proto-Sinaitic script, rather than a mere coincidence. “I think we should expect more discoveries,” he says.
Others are convinced. “It’s an alphabet,” says researcher Silvia Ferrara first languages at the University of Bologna in Italy, who did not participate in the work. “It’s easy. I’m used to much tougher things.”
“The morphology of the letters on the Zylyl seals does a pretty good job of matching the corpus of early alphabetic writing,” added Christopher Rollston, a professor of biblical and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at George Washington University who was not involved. research but studied with Schwartz as a graduate student.
Although the developers of the first alphabet were thought to have lived in Egyptian society, the egyptians and the Syrians had extensive trade networks, Ferrara says, and many inhabitants of the Near East probably knew the Egyptian writing system.
“It’s not that surprising,” he says, “to know how far these things went.”
