An image showing one of the clay clinders excavated from Syria.
Credit: Johns Hopkins University
In what could be a major breakthrough in understanding how the alphabet came into use, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have excavated evidence of what appears to be the oldest alphabetic writing in human history, going back over 4,400 years.
Symbols, believed to be some form of alphabetic script, were found etched into finger-length clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria dating back to the early Bronze Age.
Using carbon-14 dating techniques, the researchers confirmed that the cylinders date back to about 2,400 BCE, implying that the writing discovered pre-dates any other known examples of alphabetic scripts by almost 500 years.
The discovery by the researchers was presented at the American Society of Overseas Research's annual meet this week, wherein Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University, and the discoverer of the clay cylinders, explained its significance.
"Alphabets revolutionised 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 was quoted as saying by the Cosmos 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," Schwartz explained.
"Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” the professor went on to say, before adding, “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.”
Although humans had developed writing before the alphabet, these early forms of writing were mostly pictorial in nature, such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform.
Alphabetic writing, in contrast, represented a shift in communication, from pictorial to phonographic systems, where letters in the alphabet corresponded to sounds in language rather than pictures or symbols representing ideas.