Archaeologists say they have uncovered evidence of what may be the world's oldest known alphabet.
The alphabetic writing system was identified on finger-length clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in an ancient Syrian city known as Tell Umm-el Marra. The artifacts came to light during a 16-year-long excavation conducted by a team from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Researchers have dated the alphabetic writing system to around 2400 B.C.—predating other known examples by roughly 500 years.
"There are carvings on rocks and stone slabs at a turquoise mine in the Sinai, at a site called Serabit el-Khadim, and other carvings on rocks at Wadi el-Hol in upper Egypt," Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders, told Newsweek, referring to what was previously considered to be the earliest known alphabet. "The dates are debated, but something like 1900-1800 B.C. is commonly proposed. The script is understood to be alphabetic, in a Semitic language."
But the clay cylinders from Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-sized urban centers to emerge in western Syria, cast new light on the origin of alphabets and their significance among early urban civilizations.
"Alphabets revolutionized 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 said in a press release. "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."
While earlier writing systems had already emerged before 2400 B.C.—such as cuneiform, for example—these did not make use of an alphabet. Cuneiform, considered to be the oldest known writing system, was developed by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (an ancient region centered on modern-day Iraq) more than 5,000 years ago. The script used signs pressed into clay—and sometimes other materials—to represent words, sounds, or ideas.
"Cuneiform signs represent either single words or syllables, or sometimes just an idea of what kind of word the following signs refers to. For example, there can be a sign standing for 'bird'—which is not to be read but just indicates that the signs following refer to a kind of bird. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of cuneiform signs," Schwartz told Newsweek.
"But alphabetic characters only refer to the phonetic value of a sign—so the sound 'r' or 'l' or 'm,' etcetera—not syllables or complete words. So, you only need 20-30 characters for an alphabetic script, since that's usually the most phonetic values a language will have."
Excavations at Tell Umm-el Marra have uncovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age. Among these is a particularly well-preserved example in which researchers found six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead and intact pottery vessels. But beside the pottery lay another intriguing find—four lightly baked clay cylinders with what appeared to be alphabetic writing etched into them.
"The cylinders were perforated, so I'm imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label. Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to," Schwartz said in the press release. "Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate."
The researchers used radiocarbon dating techniques to determine the ages of the tombs, the artifacts and the writing on the clay cylinders.
Schwartz revealed details of the writing discovery on Thursday at the American Society of Overseas Research's Annual Meeting. While there is some uncertainty over the interpretation of the finds, he told Newsweek that "several prominent scholars" in the field have concluded that the symbols on the clay cylinders do represent an alphabetic writing system.
"Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 B.C.," Schwartz said in the release. "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."
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