World’s oldest ALPHABET is discovered: Ancient 4,400-year-old text is found on clay cylinders from a tomb in Syria – and it upends everything we thought we knew about the origin of writing
Daily Mail | 21 November 2024 | Jonathan Chadwick

For decades, it’s been a common belief that the Ancient Egyptians were responsible for the very first alphabet.

Now, a shocking finding challenges this assumption, pushing back the age of the first known alphabetic writing by about 500 years.

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The finger-length cylinders were found at Tell Umm-el Marra, a former city located in today’s northwestern Syria, once a bustling crossroads for two trade routes.

Carbon dating techniques reveal that the objects date back 4,400 years to 2400 BC – preceding any other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years.

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However, the academic admits he ‘can only speculate’ exactly what the writing says.

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Before the alphabet, humans relied on hieroglyphics, according to Professor Schwartz, who found the cylinders in 2004.

‘Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,’ he said.

‘This new discovery shows people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined.’

With colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, the professor co-directed a 16-year-long archaeological dig at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the ancient Near East’s oldest cities, located on a crossroads of two trade routes.

At Umm-el Marra, the archaeologists uncovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age – a period stretching from about 3500 to 2000 BC.

One of the best-preserved tombs contained six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead and intact pottery vessels.

Next to the pottery was four of the ‘lightly baked’ clay cylinders or tubes with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on top.

Now, the researchers have used carbon-14 dating, a scientific method that can accurately determine the age of organic materials as old as 60,000 years.

So, they found clay cylinders, which are very old, with images that can’t be deciphered. Got it.