What has been described as the world’s oldest alphabet, inscribed on a series of inscriptions on clay fragments – dating back to 2400BCE – has been uncovered in Syria, in a discovery that will have seismic consequences for scholars of the ancient world.
Archaeologists uncovered a number of finger-length clay cylinders at tombs in Umm al-Marra, Aleppo province, this month, following a 16-year dig at the Early Bronze Age site.
Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University, who found the cylinders said the discovery will give historians a tantalizing insight into the ancient world.
“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,” he said, according to the university’s student-run Hub magazine.
“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.”
The cylinders were among gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spear head, pottery, and six skeletons found at one of the best preserved tombs at the Umm al-Marra site.
The newly-discovered writing predates by 500 years the world’s previously known oldest alphabet found in Egypt, dating back to 1900BCE.
Schwartz said the alphabet was likely an early experiment in communication by West Asian royalty and elites and provides a revolutionary new understanding of ancient civilizations in the area. Yet, what was written on the cylinders will remain a mystery.
“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,” he said.
“Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to,” Dr Schwartz said. “Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”
