BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

The Oldest Alphabetic Writing Ever Found?

Discovery may move alphabet’s origins back 500 years

Four small clay cylinders, discovered at the site of Umm el-Marra in northwestern Syria, may be etched with the oldest alphabetic writing ever discovered, predating the previous record holders by half a millennium. Coming from a sound archaeological context of securely dated materials, these cylinders may rewrite what we know about the early history of the alphabet.

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Rewriting History

Discovered in 2004 by a team from Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Glenn Schwartz and Hans Curvers, the inscribed cylinders have only recently caught the attention of the wider archaeological and linguistic community. The four cylinders were discovered in a wealthy tomb, which included six individuals, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and an intact pottery vessel. The cylinders were crafted out of clay and engraved with a simple tool, probably a reed. All four are hollow and possibly once hung on a string. Each is broken on at least one end, suggesting they could have been part of a longer inscription or were originally one piece. Based on the finds, as well as radiocarbon samples, the contents of the tomb date to around 2400 to 2300 BCE. However, some have suggested that the cylinders may have been intrusive to the burial despite the excavation team firmly rejecting this.

It is precisely their date that makes the cylinders so remarkable. While writing first began in Mesopotamia and Egypt at the very end of the fourth millennium—with the invention of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, respectively—the writing at Umm el-Marra comes from neither of those scribal traditions. Instead, it bears noticeable similarities to early alphabetic inscriptions.

“The writing on these cylinder seals seems to be alphabetic writing, and I don’t really have any doubt about that,” Christopher Rollston, Professor of Biblical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, told Bible History Daily. “It’s hard for me to consider them anything but alphabetic writing since the morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals often parallels reasonably well that of the existing corpus of early alphabetic writing.”

If the cylinders do indeed contain alphabetic writing, it would drastically alter the history of the alphabet, the beginnings of which most scholars previously dated to the 19th or 18th centuries BCE. Not only does this change the dating for the invention of the alphabet, but it also raises new questions about its origins, as the previous earliest alphabetic inscriptions—the Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadem inscriptions—come from Egypt, although they were likely written in a Semitic language. Despite the difference of half a millennium and over 400 miles, the Umm el-Marra inscriptions belong to the same alphabetic tradition, even if they are not a direct ancestor of the later inscriptions. “In essence, I consider these cylinder seals to be a fledgling attempt in early alphabetic writing,” said Rollston. While some of the signs, such as the letter ayin, are remarkably similar to later alphabetic inscriptions, other signs remain ambiguous.

With each cylinder containing only a few signs, it remains impossible to determine what they originally meant or what they were used for. But that does not mean there are no theories. “The cylinders were perforated,” said Schwartz, the director of the Umm el-Marra excavation, in a press release. “So, I am 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.”

The Umm el-Marra cylinders likely represented a Semitic language–as is the case with inscriptions such as the Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadem inscriptions from Egypt–although which dialect is unknown. Given their date and location, it is possible they represent ancient Amorite, a Semitic language that has been identified in just two texts, both of which date several hundred years later. However, they could have just as easily recorded an as yet unknown Semitic language. There is also the chance that the cylinders were not meant to represent a language at all, but were instead a syllabary, a simple list of letters like the ABCs.

Recording History

The written word first sprang up at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, likely first in Mesopotamia with the invention of cuneiform, and shortly later–if not simultaneously–in Egypt with hieroglyphs. These two scripts dominated the early history of writing for at least a millennium, and both would continue to be used into the first few centuries of the Common Era. While Egyptian hieroglyphs were almost exclusively used for ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian cuneiform was adopted and used for a wide range of languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite.

It was into this bi-script world that the alphabet was born. Traditionally, the invention of the alphabet has been attributed to Semitic-speaking people living in Egypt in the 19th or 18th centuries BCE who borrowed concepts and signs from hieroglyphs to craft a script for their own language. This early alphabetic script—also called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite—would eventually become the forbearer of nearly all later alphabetic scripts. As put by Rollston, “The alphabet was invented once, and all subsequent attempts at alphabetic writing derive from the original alphabet.” Nevertheless, the early alphabetic script would give rise to the later Canaanite scripts, including Paleo-Hebrew, as well as Aramaic and Phoenician, and even Greek and Latin.

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The discovery of the Umm el-Marra cylinders alters the traditional reconstruction in interesting ways, if indeed the dating of the excavation team is correct. While the cylinders push the invention of the alphabet back nearly half a millennium, the script of the cylinders is still clearly influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs despite the fact that Syria was predominantly within the cuneiform sphere at the time. This could indicate that the alphabet is perhaps even older than these cylinders would suggest, and that alphabetic writing emerged closer to Egypt, perhaps even in Canaan. But even if the alphabet was invented in Syria, this could be explained by the large amount of trade that existed between Egypt and the Levant at the time. “After all,” says Rollston, “they only had two scripts to choose from.”

The creation of the alphabet was a monumental invention in the ancient world, as previous scripts utilized hundreds of signs in highly complex ways. “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,” said Schwartz. Rollston, however, is a little more subdued about the impact of the alphabet on the ancient world. “Alphabetic writing systems are easier to learn than non-alphabetic writing systems, but writing was primarily an elite activity, even after the invention of the alphabet. Potters, shepherds, farmers, and blacksmiths didn’t really have the need to write, and they didn’t have the time to learn to write.”

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This article was first published in Bible History Daily on December 23, 2024.

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