Clay pots reveal perhaps the world’s oldest alphabet

Twenty years ago, an ancient tomb was found near the city of Aleppo in Syria. In addition to the six skeletons, four clay sticks the size of a small finger were revealed from its caches.

Radiocarbon analysis showed the grave to be around 4,400 years ago. However, at the time of the discovery, the meaning of the symbols carved into the oblong clay objects was still obscure.

Now a professor of archeology at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, who participated in the excavations Glenn Schwartz has analyzed the pits thoroughly.

He has come to the conclusion that the symbols they contain can represent the sounds corresponding to the letters a, i, k, l, n, s and y.

According to Schwartz, they may be traces of the oldest known alphabet.

Johns Researchers from Hopkins and the University of Amsterdam discovered the tomb in the ancient city of Umm el-Marra in northwestern Syria in 2004.

The finds are dated to the Early Bronze Age, around 2600–2150 before the start of the countdown, and a city seems to have flourished on the site at that time.

Particularly significant in Umm el-Marra is the large one tomb complexwhere human remains have been found as well as gold jewelry, silver dishes, an ivory comb and a blue lapis lazuli stone.

Members of the elite of that time are probably buried there.

Schwartz introduced brands already in 2021 in the Italian Pasiphae in the journal. Schwartz was then still cautious in his interpretation of the alphabet.

“I was probably too timid,” he says for Scientific American.

Now he is more convinced, and the show at the American Science Congress In Boston at the end of November, the discovery has also been raised, for example Nature journal to the news front page.

The characters do not correspond to any known language, but Schwartz has compared them to characters used in Semitic languages ​​such as ancient and modern Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.

The engravings could be the names of the people in the grave or markings on the objects, Schwartz told Nature.

In the alphabet is typically around 20–40 characters.

The ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs and the Mesopotamians used cuneiform. Hieroglyphs were originally picture writing, where one picture meant a whole word. Later, hieroglyphs developed so that the pictures also began to represent sounds, and by combining such signs it was possible to write new words.

Researchers have not calculated the hieroglyphs representing words into an alphabet that divides words into individual vowel and consonant sounds.

Until now, the first alphabet has been considered to be the writing found in Egypt, which dates from around 1900 before the beginning of the chronology.

The discovery by Schwartz and his partners is therefore from about 500 years earlier.

Yet it is not known for certain whether the Engravers of the clay pots were influenced by hieroglyphs or whether they developed the script independently.

According to Nature, two of the characters resemble hieroglyphs. Schwartz considers it possible that the inhabitants of Umm el-Marra have been in direct contact with Egyptian hieroglyphs through trade relations.

The clay pots are about a centimeter thick and barely five centimeters long. They have small holes, so they could also be bundled into some kind of chain.

One of the pieces of clay seems to have the word silanu or sillanu, which may refer to the name. It is also associated with a word meaning stone.