Archaeologists Say These Mysterious Markings Could Be the World’s Oldest Known Alphabetic Writing

A few decades ago, researchers discovered four small clay cylinders marked with strange symbols at an ancient tomb in Syria. They’ve now concluded that those symbols are letters—and they may be the world’s oldest known evidence of alphabetic writing.

The tomb is located in Tell Umm-el Marra, an ancient city some 35 miles east of Aleppo. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam found the marked cylinders in 2004, and Johns Hopkins archaeologist Glenn Schwartz described them in a paper in 2021. But according to Scientific American’s Stephanie Pappas, the research didn’t attract widespread attention until this week, when Schwartz presented it at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.

Before the invention of alphabets, early writing systems—like hieroglyphs and cuneiform—used symbols representing objects or phonetic sounds. Eventually, Proto-Sinaitic script, which transformed some hieroglyphs into alphabetic letters, emerged in the Sinai Peninsula around 1900 B.C.E.

Scholars have long thought that this was when the alphabet was invented, as Schwartz says in a statement. “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.”

Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that the cylinders were made around 2400 B.C.E., which would make them about 500 years older than other known alphabetic scripts. If the cylinders’ markings are alphabetic letters, they represent a pivotal shift in humans’ development of language.

As Schwartz tells McClatchy’s Irene Wright, older writing systems could feature thousands of characters or symbols representing full words, syllables or combinations of phonemes—“the smallest sound segments that languages have.” Alphabetic systems are much simpler: They contain only 20 to 30 characters, “since that’s the usual maximum number of phonemes a language will use.”

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” says Schwartz in the statement. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”

The tomb in Tell Umm-el Marra contained six skeletons—likely members of a wealthy and powerful family. It also held cookware, jewelry, a spearhead and pottery vessels. The clay cylinders were found alongside these artifacts. Each cylinder sports a small hole, which may have been used to attach them to something.

“I’m imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label,” says Schwartz in the statement. “Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to.”

Schwartz tells Scientific American that one of the clay cylinders is marked with the word “Silanu,” which he thinks may be a name: Perhaps Silanu was the sender or recipient of the grave goods, and the clay cylinder might have been attached to a vessel like a gift tag. But without a way to translate the writing, researchers can only guess.

Schwartz says that “several prominent scholars” have also agreed that the characters are part of an alphabet, according to Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou. However, this conclusion is not universally accepted. Some researchers say they’re still hoping for more evidence that the symbols aren’t from another kind of old writing system.

“When you only have a few very short inscriptions, it can be difficult to tell how many signs the system has,” as Philippa Steele, a classicist at the University of Cambridge, tells Scientific American. She can’t be sure the engravings match Proto-Sinaitic writing rather than just resemble it. “I think we have to hope for more finds.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.