Oldest alphabet ever discovered in Syria

Stone cylinders contained an alphabet written around 2400 BC and have been found in Bronze Age tombs.

“Alphabets revolutionized writing, making it accessible to people other than royalty and the social elite. It changed the way people lived, how they thought and how they communicated,” he told Glenn Schwartzprofessor of archeology at Johns Hopkins University, who discovered the clay cylinders containing letters.

At the Syrian site of Tell Umm-el Marra, the archaeologist and other colleagues from the University of Amsterdam spent 16 years excavating one of the earliest medium-sized urban centers that emerged in western Syria.

The result was the discovery of tombs from the Bronze Age (which began approximately 3300 BC), the age of which was confirmed through carbon-14 dating techniqueswhich contained intact skeletons, jewelry, kitchen utensils, spearheads and ceramic vessels.

It was next to these vases that the team found four lightly baked clay cylinders inscribed with the alphabet oldest on record.

“The cylinders were punctured, so I imagine a wire connecting them to another object to serve as a label. Maybe they detail the contents of a container, or maybe where the container came from, or who it belonged to,” Schwartz said. “Without a way to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”

“This new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined until now”, says the archaeologist to Phys.

“Previously, Scholars thought the alphabet was invented in Egypt or in its surroundings, sometime after 1900 BC,” said Schwartz, who will present the results of the discoveries this Thursday at the American Society for Overseas Research.

“But our artifacts are older and from a different area of ​​the mapwhich suggests that it may have a completely different origin story than we thought”, concludes the researcher.