World’s Oldest Alphabet Found | Scientific American

World’s Oldest Alphabet Discovered on an Historic Clay Reward Tag

By Stephanie Pappas

Researchers could have deciphered the oldest recognized scrap of alphabetic writing but found, and it could be a virtually 4,500-year-old reward tag.

A clay cylinder present in a tomb holding six skeletons in northern Syria bears the phrase “silanu,” which can be a reputation, says Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at Johns Hopkins College. Schwartz found the finger-sized cylinder, together with three others bearing related etchings, in a tomb at Inform Umm el-Marra, an historical metropolis that sits between modern-day Aleppo and the Euphrates River.

Alphabets break phrases into single vowels and consonants and usually require solely 20 to 40 characters. That makes alphabetic methods extra streamlined and simpler to study than the writing methods that got here earlier than—Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. These methods used a whole lot of symbols that primarily represented phrases and syllables fairly than particular person sounds. Scientists beforehand thought that the primary alphabet was created round 1900 B.C.E. by individuals talking a Semitic language on the Sinai Peninsula in what’s now Egypt. That alphabet, known as Proto-Sinaitic, is predicated on hieroglyphic symbols repurposed as letters. The brand new discovering suggests as an alternative that folks in farther-flung reaches of the Close to East experimented with hieroglyph-derived letters a lot earlier.

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“It changes the entire narrative of how the alphabet was introduced,” Schwartz says. Small holes drilled into the cylinders might have been used to string them on thread. As such, the clay constructions might have served as labels for items; Sinalu may need been both the recipient or sender of among the jars of meals and beverage positioned within the tomb to accompany its occupants into the afterlife, Schwartz says. The tomb doubtless belonged to a rich and highly effective household within the metropolis.

Archaeologists first discovered the cylinders in 2004, and radiocarbon evaluation indicated the clay dated again to about 2400 B.C.E. In 2021 Schwartz described the cylinders in an Italian journal known as Pasiphae. The analysis didn’t get a lot consideration, partially as a result of Schwartz was cautious in pushing his interpretation of the inscriptions as alphabetic letters. “I probably was too timid,” he says.

He introduced a extra assured interpretation this week on the annual assembly of the American Society of Abroad Analysis, held in Boston. Some researchers, who had entry to only some snapshots of the cylinders previous to the discuss, mentioned they had been trying ahead to extra proof that the inscriptions characterize an alphabet fairly than one other sort of writing system. “When you only have a few very short inscriptions, it can be difficult to tell how many signs the system has,” says Philippa Steele, a senior researcher in classics on the College of Cambridge. With so few indicators to work from, she says, it’s arduous to make certain that the brand new etchings actually match up with recognized Proto-Sinaitic writing fairly than resemble it by coincidence. “I think we have to hope for more finds,” she says.

Others are satisfied. “It’s an alphabet,” says Silvia Ferrara, a researcher in early languages on the College of Bologna in Italy, who was not concerned within the work. “It’s easy-peasy. I’m used to much tougher things.”

“The morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals parallels quite nicely that of the existing corpus of early alphabetic writing,” provides Christopher Rollston, a professor of biblical and Close to Japanese languages and civilizations at George Washington College, who was not concerned within the new analysis however did research beneath Schwartz as a graduate scholar.

Whereas the builders of the primary alphabet had been as soon as regarded as residing inside Egyptian society, Egyptians and Syrians had in depth commerce networks, Ferrara says, and plenty of populations across the Center East had been doubtless aware of the Egyptian writing system.

“It’s not that surprising,” she says, “knowing how far and wide these things traveled.”