Cylinders discovered in 2004 are inscribed with the earliest known examples of letters, say archaeologists

Evidence of oldest known alphabet unearthed among Syrian tomb treasures

Cylinders discovered in 2004 are inscribed with the earliest known examples of letters, say archaeologists

Clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria and dated to 4,400 years ago are inscribed with traces of the earliest known alphabetic writing system, an analysis suggests.

The tomb was discovered in Umm el-Marra near Aleppo in 2004 and contained human remains and other objects from the Early Bronze Age (2600–2150 bc). The items included four clay cylinders, each about the size of a finger, engraved with eight distinct symbols.

“These inscriptions might rekindle the idea of the location of where we have the earliest alphabet,” says Chris Dobbs-Allsopp, who studies the Old Testament and Semitic languages at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

Archaeologist Glenn Schwartz at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who co-led the excavation and analysed the inscriptions, now suggests that the symbols represent sounds that correspond to a, i, k, l, n, s and y.

The characters do not correspond to a known language, but Schwartz compared them with characters used in West Semitic languages — including ancient and modern forms of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic — to decode them. The inscriptions might record people’s names or label objects in the tomb, said Schwartz, who presented his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research in Boston, Massachusetts, on 21 November.

Tomb treasures

Archaeologists found the cylinders in one of ten tombs in Umm el-Marra. The burial areas also contained gold jewellery, silver vessels, an ivory comb and pottery. “Judging from their contents, these tombs belonged to people of the highest social rank,” Schwartz said at the meeting.

The cylinders are each one centimetre thick and 4.7 centimetres long, pierced with a small lengthwise hole. In 2021, using radiocarbon dating, Schwartz and his team determined¹ that the tubes originate from around 2400 bc. “It’s 500 years earlier than any other early alphabetic inscription we have. So that’s surprising,” says Dobbs-Allsopp.

Before their discovery, a script from 1900 bc in Egypt was the oldest known alphabetic writing; it turned hieroglyphs into alphabetic letters of West Semitic languages. Hieroglyphs are not considered an alphabet because they mainly use pictures to represent entire words, rather than consisting of a set of letters that each correspond to a sound.

The symbols appear 11 times in total on the cylinders and some are repeated — evidence that they might be part of an alphabet. Two of the four cylinders seem to have the same sequence, finishing with the same symbol at their unbroken ends. The longer the sequence of symbols, the more likely it is to represent writing rather than comprising non-linguistic symbols, said Schwartz.

Semitic-languages specialist Theodore Lewis at Johns Hopkins, who worked with Schwartz, suggests that one sequence, which can be translated to ‘sl'nw’, might be the name Sillunu found in texts from the site of Ugarit, an ancient city on the Syrian coast, and derived from a word that means rock.

Names or labels

Schwartz suggests that the inscriptions might describe items in the tomb or say to whom they belonged. “If the Umm el-Marra cylinders were tags or labels, this would be consistent with the association of writing with increasing administrative needs,” he said at the meetings.

The analysis also raises questions about whether the cylinders’ creators were influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs or whether people had developed an alphabet independently in the Levant.

Two characters resemble hieroglyphs, and Schwartz suggests that the people in Umm el-Marra who crafted the cylinders might have had direct contact with Egyptian hieroglyphs through trade.

If the signs are similar to those used in the Egyptian system, “it would be too much coincidence if it was an invention of an alphabetic script totally separately”, says Dobbs-Allsopp.

Schwartz hopes that future studies can uncover the symbols’ meaning and help to solve the mystery of when the first alphabet developed.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03876-3

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Miryam Naddaf