Between 1994 and 2010, American and Dutch archaeologists excavated an Early Bronze Age site east of Aleppo, Syria. In a well-preserved tomb, they found skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and pottery. Next to the pottery, however, they uncovered something potentially more valuable than everything else combined: four 4,400-year-old clay cylinders etched with what seems to be an alphabet.
Now, Glenn Schwartz, the Johns Hopkins University archaeologist who made the discovery, is claiming that the four finger-length artifacts might be the oldest known evidence of alphabetic writing in history. If this assessment, detailed in a November 20 university statement and announced at the American Society of Overseas Research‘s Annual Meeting the following day, is correct, it would disrupt previous assumptions about the origin and spread of the first known alphabet.
“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” Schwartz said in the statement. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”
Scholars have debated the origin of the first alphabet for years, but most of them agree that the first known alphabet was developed in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. The new finding could change this. Carbon dating—a tried-and-true method for dating organic matter—placed the small cylinders to around 2400 BCE, predating that timeline by roughly 500 years.
“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “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.”
The finding came within the context of a joint Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam excavation at Tell Umm-el Marra, an urban settlement founded around 2700 BCE in modern-day western Syria suspected of being the ancient city of Tuba.
5,500-Year-Old Seals Offer New Clues About the Birth of Writing
“The cylinders were perforated, so I’m imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label. Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to,” Schwartz said. “Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”
The finding has the potential to upend established archaeological assumptions about the origin of the oldest known alphabet, and with it the start of crucial developments that followed, including more efficient record-keeping and long-distance communication.
Alphabet OriginsAncient HistoryArchaeologyWriting Systems
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Source: Gizmodo