From a Johns Hopkins press release:
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 civilizations.
“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 Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. “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.”
Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the American Society of Overseas Research’s Annual Meeting. […] “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “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.”
Exciting if true, but I’ll await those details. Thanks, Dmitry!
Glenn Schwartz published a book on Umm el-Marra a few months ago
https://www.ioa.ucla.edu/animalsancestorsritual
and the JHU updated its report pages earlier this year, with images of mysterious clay cylinders, but not insisting yet that it looked like a form of writing
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/ummelmarra/2014/01/27/urban-origins-the-early-bronze-age-ca-2700-2000-bc-umm-el-marra-periods-vi-iv/
Count me a skeptic but I am waiting for more details
A little more info from today’s Jerusalem Post:
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Next to the pottery vessels, the researchers found four lightly baked clay cylinders with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on them. “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 about the cylinders. “Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate,” he remarked.
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Here’s a picture of one of the cylinders from JHU.
Curious about how they dated these objects. As I understand it, you can’t date pottery-as-such (i.e. the ceramic part) with yer basic radiocarbon techniques, but you can do it if the particular clay pot has enough soot or animal-fat residue on it. But these cylinders don’t sound like the cooking/eating sort of pottery where that sort of associated carbon-containing material would be probable or at least plausible.
Thermoluminescence might work on the actual ceramic part.
Anyway, one click away is this article on the same cylinders and the same Glenn Schwartz, but from July 2021. Yep, the signs look like letters, but there are so few on each cylinder that there are equally few limits to speculation.
The dating is probably from carbon in the same context, not from the cylinders themselves.
Rollston, a careful debunker of such claims, is very positive. But he is also Schwartz’s student.
The signs on Harappan seals look like letters too, but are they?