The origins of writing, as we know it, are older than paleographers and historians thought. In a Syrian tomb, along with jewelry made of precious materials, the oldest alphabet recorded so far was found. The discovery is 500 years older than any other known phoneme system.
An international team of archaeologists presented their discovery at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Overseas Research. For the past 16 years they have excavated at the archaeological site of Mmm-el Marra, one of the first urban areas in Syria. Their work exploring tombs led them to the discovery of four clay cylinders with “letter” markings on them.
For researchers, the markings on fired pottery have a high probability of being part of a larger alphabet. Radiocarbon dating revealed that the material was treated in the year 2400 BC. C. Until now, the oldest known alphabetic writing came from the year 1900 BC. C., around Egypt.
An alphabet that is currently impossible to decipher
Pottery was part of the items inside tombs from the Early Bronze Age in Syria. The alphabet fragment was next to six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, kitchen utensils and ceramic vessels. Along with these contents were the four cylinders with the writing. The archaeologists in charge of the investigation think that they were probably labels to warn the contents of the tomb because the cylinders were perforated.
“I imagine a string tying them to other objects to act as a tag. Without a means to translate what is written, we can only speculate,” explained Glenn Schwartz, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the social elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, and how they communicated. “This new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different place than we had imagined until now,” added Schwartz.
How to distinguish an alphabet
Of course, there are records of communication recorded on ceramics much older than the Syrian tablets. The cuneiform system of Mesopotamia is the best example of this. The origin of the symbols can be traced back to 4000 BC. C., at least two millennia before the discovery in Syria.
According to experts on the subject, similar writing systems cannot be considered alphabets because they still use logograms: representations of concepts or words without a pronunciation. For example, multiple cultures have chosen to draw a circle with rays to exemplify the Sun. This logogram appears in their communication systems as paintings or engravings, but it cannot be taken as part of a more complex word.
On the other hand, alphabets are distinguished by having a set of symbols or letters that represent basic sounds of the language. Each member of this base is called a phoneme, the most basic unit of sound in a language. Their combination forms words with meaning depending on their configuration. For Syrian archaeologists, the tablets have characteristics of an alphabet.
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