Clay objects roughly the size of fingers were discovered during a dig at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra. The engraved symbols may be part of the earliest known alphabet. Credit: Glenn Schwartz/  Johns Hopkins University. CC BY.

Archaeological findings in an ancient Syrian city suggest alphabetic writing is some 500 years older than previously thought.

What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.

The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilisations.

Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders, said: “Alphabets revolutionised 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, 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.”

Tombs

A Near Eastern archaeologist, Schwartz studies how early urban areas developed throughout Syria and how smaller cities emerged in the region.

With colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, he co-directed a 16-year-long archaeological dig at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-size urban centres that popped up in western Syria. 

At Umm-el Marra, the archaeologists uncovered tombs dating back to the Early Bronze Age.

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

Next to the pottery, the researchers found four lightly baked clay cylinders with what seems to be alphabetic writing on them. 

Schwartz said: “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.

“Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”

Using carbon-14 dating techniques, researchers confirmed the ages of the tombs, the artifacts, and the writing. 

Schwartz concluded: “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE, 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.”