World's oldest alphabet found in Syria
November 24, 2024
Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Archaeologists have found the world’s oldest evidence of alphabetic writing in an ancient Syrian tomb, challenging previous conceptions about the origin of alphabets.
Clay object discovered at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra. Credit: Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University.
The findings, presented at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting this week, show the writing, etched into finger-length clay cylinders, dates to about 2400 BCE. This precedes any other known examples of alphabetic scripts by about 500 years.
Humans had developed writing before alphabets. The earliest ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs date to about 5,200 years ago. Slightly older is the first cuneiform text – the Kish tablet – found in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk in modern southern Iraq, inscribed in about 3400 BCE. Archaeologists have even found evidence of proto-cuneiform from 6,000 years ago, also at Uruk.
Alphabetic writing represented the shift to phonographic systems – writing where letters represent sounds in a language, rather than pictographs or symbols representing words or ideas. Some early cuneiform was partially phonological.
“Alphabets revolutionised writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” says the discoverer of the clay cylinders Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University in the US. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”
More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/oldest-alphabet-writing-syria/