Summary: Could ancient writing unearthed in a Syrian tomb be the oldest known alphabet in the world?
Provide three men from each tribe, and I will send them out that they may set out and go up and down the land. They shall write a description of it with a view to their inheritances, and then come to me. – Joshua 18:4 (ESV)
Ancient Alphabetic Script
A new and fascinating discovery is being called by some the “oldest known alphabet” ever found. The find has the potential to impact views about the feasibility and manner in which the Bible was written. The ancient writing, etched onto finger-length clay cylinders, was unearthed in a tomb in Syria. This unprecedented discovery suggests that “the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story” than was formerly thought, said the researchers.
“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE. 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,” said the archaeologist behind the clay cylinder’s discovery, Glenn Schwartz.
Dated around 2400 BC, the writing precedes other known alphabetic inscriptions by about 500 years. If verified it would overturn what scholars formerly believed about the foundation and evolution of alphabets and what they meant for early civilizations.
Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics
Some of the oldest forms of visual communication found include cave paintings, recordings of specific experiences or events. Eventually, pictograms were developed where certain pictures came to represent particular meanings consistently.
Thousands of years ago, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia used cuneiform writing, wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets created with a reed stylus. These images were often used as a means of recording transactions.
Hieroglyphics were developed by the Ancient Egyptians who used pictures as symbols for objects and sounds. Chinese logographic script also was a written language that was built piece by piece with a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word. These ancient scripts were very complicated, consisting of many hundreds of symbols.
Alphabetic scripts were a unique development. They radically simplified things by using letters to represent only individual phonemes or distinct units of sound. “The older known writing systems use symbols or characters to represent words, but also syllables or combinations of phonemes (the smallest sound segments that languages have). Alphabetic characters refer only to phonemes,” said Schwartz, professor of archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite,” Schwartz said. “Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated.”
We take the alphabet for granted today, but its development changed the world, making reading and writing accessible to common people who didn’t have the opportunity to specialize in the complicated writing systems like hieroglyphics or cuneiform which contained thousands of characters. The power of the alphabet was its simplicity and flexibility, allowing all the words of a language to be written with just a small set of 20 or 30 phonetic symbols.
Tell Umm el-Marra, Syria
The ancient clay cylinders with etched phonemes were unearthed by Schwartz at Tell Umm el-Marra, an archaeological excavation site in western Syria, about a 35-mile drive east from Aleppo. Together with colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, Schwarz led a 16-year archaeological dig at Umm el-Marra, one of the first medium-sized urban centers that popped up in the area.
Syria has endured ongoing devastation due to years of civil war, yet remains home to some of the world’s most significant historical sites. While several of these landmarks, such as the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra, have suffered damage in the civil war, many ancient treasures have endured, preserving Syria’s status as a cradle of archaeological wonders.
At the Umm el-Marra site, archaeologists uncovered tombs dating to the Early Bronze Age. One well-preserved tomb was found to contain six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, intact pottery, cookware, and a spearhead. Along with the artifacts, researchers found the four “lightly baked clay cylinders” etched with alphabetic writing, according to the November 2024 Johns Hopkins press release.
“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. “Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”
According to the researchers, the age of the site and clay pieces were dated to around 2400 BC by carbon-14 dating techniques, a process that measures the breakdown of carbon over time. This places the origin of the artifacts about 500 years before the previously known oldest alphabetic writing.
Schwartz emphasized the significance of the find, noting that previous theories placed the invention of the alphabet in or near Egypt around 1900 BC. “What we’ve uncovered is older and from a completely different region, suggesting the origin story of the alphabet could be far more complex than we imagined,” he stated.
Glen Schwartz is the Archaeology Program director and Whiting professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University. His 2024 book, “Animals, Ancestors, and Ritual in Early Bronze Age Syria: An Elite Mortuary Complex from Umm el-Marra,” is a final report of the 16 years of excavations at Umm el-Marra.
Ancient Semitic Languages
In Schwartz’s presentation on the cylinders, he contended that while the symbols do not correspond to any known language, by comparing them to characters used in ancient Semitic languages, he could see they represent sounds that corresponded to the letters A, I, K, L, N, S and Y.
The ancient cylinders are uniform in shape, each being just under half an inch thick and almost two inches long, with small holes on either end. The symbols “appear 11 times in total on the cylinders and some are repeated, evidence that they might be part of an alphabet,” he explained.
“Two of the four cylinders seem to have the same sequence, finishing with the same symbol…. The longer the sequence of symbols, the more likely it is to represent writing,” Schwartz said in his presentation. He suggested that, because two of the symbols resemble hieroglyphs, the creators of the cylinders “might have had direct contact with Egyptian hieroglyphs through trade.”
“The northern Levant was under regular Egyptian influence throughout this period and therefore serves as a plausible, even likely, locus of the type of cross-cultural interaction that led to the alphabetic adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphs,” said Brandeis University Dr. Madadh Richey, who highlighted the importance of the Umm el-Marra cylinders in a paper called “Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Origins of the Alphabet,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Maarav (University of Chicago Press).
Richey pointed out that even though the cylinders were discovered in 2010, the findings hadn’t gained traction in the field suggesting “a level of scholarly discomfort with what appears to be field-changing data.”
Biblical Connections
It is interesting to consider the idea of writing in the Bible. The standard academic view has writing arising during the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia. However, the Bible paints a picture of ingenious and inventive people with extraordinarily long lifespans right from the beginning. The early chapters of Genesis mention a “book of the generations of Adam.” Could these ancient accounts already have been written down in the era of Adam and his immediate descendants? There seems to be no reason to discount that possibility, though there is no indication whether such writing may have used an alphabet or not.
This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. – Genesis 5:1
Some believe the recently discovered Syrian inscriptions are too short and few to establish with confidence that this represents an alphabet script. Others question the dates that have been assigned to them. These are serious considerations. But if it is eventually determined that this was an alphabet, centuries older than the previously oldest examples, it would argue against the theory that the Israelites may have invented the world’s first alphabet while they sojourned in Egypt. This theory was considered in The Moses Controversy film. In that case the inscriptions from the Nile Valley and mines at Serabit el-Khadim would only highlight a major development of the alphabetic script (just in time for Moses to write the Bible) rather than the first time an alphabet had ever been conceived of.
One thing is certain, if these finds do end up establishing the reality of an older alphabet in Syria, it would only strengthen the case that a suitable script was available for Moses to write the first books of the Bible (known as the Torah or Pentateuch), as the Bible itself claims. Many scholars have cast doubts on Moses writing these books, in part because they believe there was no writing system available at that time to perform the task of writing such a sophisticated and lengthy document. As time goes by, new discoveries are making that argument groundless.
Then Moses wrote this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and to all the elders of Israel. – Deuteronomy 31:9
Conclusion
This groundbreaking discovery, along with other artifacts uncovered in the region, may rewrite the history of the alphabet, shedding new light on the development of alphabetic systems, how they spread across societies, and their implications for early urban cultures. It may also further establish the reasonableness of the claim that Moses wrote the first books of the Bible. No matter when the alphabet arose, it can be considered a gift from God to facilitate the writing of the Bible.
Keep Thinking!
TOP PHOTO: Clay cylinder discovered at Tell Umm el-Marra, Syria etched with what appear to be letters, archaeologists said. (credit: Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University)
