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?
At the bottom of Stu’s Johns Hopkins link is a link to an earlier JHU article which gives the history — found in 2004, illustrated in the site report in 2006. Frustration that no experts in ancient writing even engaged with it, a paper in a small Italian journal in 2019 but still no real interest till Rollston’s blogpost in 2021.
(Ah, this is also the article David linked)
The point I’d like to understand better is the cave-in of the wall that sealed the context, mentioned in Rollston’s piece. How do they know when that happened and that these objects didn’t topple in from outside with the bricks?
Similarity to the letters of Early Alphabetic, whose closest exemplars are a couple samples from half a millennium later, also raises my eyebrows a bit, as does the idea that some characters are also similar to Harappan symbols.
It seems to be uncertain whether the marks are writing at all. Assuming that they are, they only way to be sure that they represent alphabetical writing would be
(a) to decipher the language they’re in definitively and show that it’s been written alphabetically
or
(b) to show clear formal resemblances to a known later alphabet (which still might not prove the point: unless the actual values match, this means nothing with simple signs, and even if the later system is truly alphabetic, it doesn’t follow that the earlier system was already an alphabet)
or
(c) to show that there were too few signs in the total inventory for the system to be a syllabary.
None of the above seems to be on the cards. “Looks like an alphabet to me” doesn’t begin to cut it.
There is also an assumption that the development of the alphabetic principle in writing is somehow natural and obvious. Evidence suggests that this is far from true.
The stuff about the revolutionary consequences of alphabetic writing is fanciful. It is not borne out by the actual history of literacy: for example, there are huge numbers of surviving texts in Akkadian, which is vastly better attested in terms of sheer quantity than ancient alphabetically-written Canaanite languages. (And a syllabary would do just as well for democratising writing in many languages, anyway. If not better.)
But if it’s true, why did this particular alphabetic system apparently fizzle out without any consequences at all (or descendants)? Was it suppressed by the scribes?
(I suspect that the alphabet-as-liberator trope goes straight back to the Victorian “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” misrepresentation of Chinese history, combined with worship of the Ancient Greeks as the source of all Civilisation worthy of the name.)
I suspect your suspicion is accurate.
Dating in a sealed locus is often from other objects in that locus, as mentioned above in terms of carbon.
But pottery typology is also often used for a dating range.
And if that sealed locus is beneath another sealed locus, without intrusion, or beneath a dated destruction ash layer, without intrusion, that stratigraphy may provide a terminus.
I think the more liberatory “innovation” was writing on a flexible medium like papyrus, vellum, or paper. It was the longue durée one-two punch of Greek culture and Christianity, not reason, that ended the various native Egyptian scripts. However, although varieties of scripts have come and gone along with the passing of prestigious literate cultures, no one has ever gone back to writing on clay.
There were a few instances of innovating cuneiform to write a syllabary or abjad, but the cuneiform scripts never made the jump to papyrus, and once the elaborate social systems that demanded the types of texts that were written in cuneiform faded under the Seleucids, so did knowledge of cuneiform.
Printing is probably a better Liberator candidate than the alphabet, too. Though I think it’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect with these things sometimes. In general, “This One Weird Technology will let you …” stories ought to be viewed with some suspicion. They’re a kind of Great Men of History idea, and similarly, the problem is not that they are ideologically suspect (though they sometimes can be) but that they miss the fact that neither Great Men nor Great Ideas arise de novo in a vacuum. (As Obama said: “You didn’t build that” – and got promptly denounced for it by the Unreality-Based Right Wing Community now in the ascendant.)
Reverting to my earlier point, not only is the idea of alphabetic writing very far from obvious (other than in hindsight), but several creators of writing systems who did know about alphabetic writing have opted instead for syllabaries as being both easier to learn and more practical.
While David’s opinion that this is far-fetched may turn out to be accurate, his idea that they have not even set out to pursue any of his posited proofs is factually incorrect. They are making a specific claim related to David’s plausible proof b – that is, that the letters look like not “early alphabetic writing” but Early Alphabetic, for instance from Serabit el-Khadem and Wadi el-Hol.
Here is Rollston:
>I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).
This is what I was getting at in saying that I was wary of a claim that they look like something that was only attested 500 years later. That early alphabets and scripts evolve quite a bit over that kind of timeline. And the suggestion of Harappan similarities to me makes it worse – are these just common doodles.
But Rollston doesn’t put forward Harappan symbology. He describes the history of Early Alphabetic. He also conveys Schwartz’s reading:
>The readings (with various caveats and provisos) of the first cylinder and third cylinders are posited by Schwartz to be, in essence, k’y (reading dextrograde), with that of the second reading wn‘ls. The fourth cylinder is more fragmentary with only a single grapheme preserved, and probably not fully (thus the options are greater, in terms of possible readings).
This is one of Rollston’s important caveats:
>Naturally, since we are dealing with one-line inscriptions, making a certain determination about the direction of writing is difficult (since one can often find a possible root word in Semitic with which to associate one’s decision about the direction of reading).
From this, I think you can tell that the idea that they merely say “this looks like an alphabet to me” is based on failure to grapple with the argument.
But read more. The Rollston piece is quite detailed and interesting.
If the idea is that it can be shown to be an earlier version of the proto-Sinaitic script, fair enough (though it looks to me as if there may be far too many degrees of freedom for assigning “readings” to these symbols for anyone to be able to do more than conjecture.)
It seems clear enough in any case that the origins of alphabetic writing go back to long before it really caught on in a big way. The stuff about “revolutionising” writing would actually undermine the argument for antedating the alphabet if it were not evidently wholly anachronistic. Alphabetic writing didn’t take off until the languages that used it became widespread, except in the case of Egyptian (and even then, that took two thousand years to happen.)
I’m not sure that the arguments (however unconvincing some may find them) for “alphabets” as a great driver of civilization and progress are really focused on “alphabets” in the narrow technical sense that would exclude syllabaries and abugidas and whatnot. I suspect that the contrast is instead between “a fairly small set of glyphs which represent sounds” approach and a “here are lots and lots of symbols that someone is going to call ideograms or logograms.” It’s not just a contrast with sluggish Cathay in modern times but the notion that the Phoenicians/Greeks (and maybe even some Mesopotamians …) had achieved a definitive technical advance over the original Egyptian hieroglyphic script.
Note btw that syllabaries are an easier sell for languages whose phonotactics make the entire set of possible syllables (or “morae” if you like) manageably small. English, for example, is not such a language due both to our fairly extensive inventory of vowels and our fairly extensive inventory of permissible consonant clusters.
Even with cuneiform, the transition from Dreadful But Usable Writing System to Somewhat Better Writing System seems to have been occasioned by the necessity of adapting the Sumerian script to the utterly different hitherto-unwritten Akkadian, along with the death of Sumerian itself as a spoken language. If you’re adapting your writing system to a new language, you’re likely to simplify things, or at least systematise them a bit; or even to say “screw it, let’s refactor the whole thing from scratch.”
@JWB:
By “alphabets”, I also meant abugidas. I’ve never been convinced that this is a very meaningful distinction (other than as a purely technical issue.) No writing system ever devised captures all the contrasts of the corresponding spoken language.
True that syllabaries are a better fit for some languages than others. Mind you, it didn’t stop the Mycenaeans or the Cypriots …
English, for example, is not such a language due both to our fairly extensive inventory of vowels and our fairly extensive inventory of permissible consonant clusters.
English doesn’t need all those vowel nuances (East Coast, Midwest etc). If Trump lowers the boom on woke permissiveness in this area, I’m sure life will be a lot easier.
Japanese went in both directions at once.
And Tangut… I maintain the Tangut script is the most wrong-headed idea of several millennia.
Pahlavi scribes did their best, given that they had the misfortune to be saddled with an alphabet:
(a) write no vowels
(b) use 12 letters for 23 consonants. No diacritics! No digraphs! They are not the Persian Way!
(c) write all common words in Aramaic. Inflect the Aramaic verb forms randomly
(d) PROFIT!
(Oh, if you must write Persian words in Persian, use a historical spelling that does not reflect current pronunciation. But I’m sure you knew that. Scribe 101. Even foreigners know that one.)
People will put up with some really objectively bad scripts if it helps them get a job (which explains the survival of php)
(Oh, if you must write Persian words in Persian, use a historical spelling that does not reflect current pronunciation. But I’m sure you knew that. Scribe 101. Even foreigners know that one.)
So English was influenced by Persian? French too?
I’m quite fond of the also-alphabetic Tibetan script, in which (for example) dbus is (Lhasa) [y] and brgyad is [cɛ]. Mind you, I think you can always deduce the pronunciation from the spelling, which spoils the fun. Must try harder.
So English was influenced by Persian? French too?
Nah, it’s just one of Greenberg’s language universals. I forget which …
Anyone know if Peter T, Daniels, scholar and writer on writing systems, has commented?
ə de vivre: Did you miss the Sumerian beer post or did you just not have anything to say?
Most Tibetan languages these days, Lhasa included, have tones; these, too, can be deduced from the spelling AFAIK. I’ve said before that Tibetan is like French but on both ends of each word/syllable.
The real fun begins when Mongolian is written with Tibetan letters and Tibetan spelling conventions. Naturally, it has been done.
Stephan Beyer cites sku-bde-rigs “musk” (rather than “species of bodily happiness”), a loan from Mongolian kudɛri.
It may be that Elon is a Species of Bodily Happiness. Alas, we just don’t know.
@LH, oh, I missed it, I’ll take a look!
DE’s remarks about cuneiform ignore its final development i.e. Achaemenid cuneiform, which was in fact close to being an alphabet. And even that was superceded still in the Achaemenid empire by Aramaic as the language of administration.
That suggests that quite a few people though alphabets were superior.
I”m well aware of that, Grubtal. Ugaritic is an even better example. This is in no way incompatible with what I actually said. Read it again.