Our humdrum A-Z goes back further than we think

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The writer is a science commentator

The well-preserved tomb near Aleppo in Syria contained six skeletons, gold and silver jewellery, cookware, pottery and even a spearhead. But it was the finger-shaped clay cylinders lying nearby that transfixed archaeologists.

Each cylinder was inscribed with a string of symbols. Carbon dating suggested the tomb and its treasures dated back to 2400 BCE. That put the cylinders in the frame as possibly the oldest known representation of alphabetic lettering, a form of written communication quite different from the elaborate writing systems that preceded it, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform. The shift to simpler alphabets, based on short sounds, would have marked a step-change in the way that humans understood each other, spreading the power of written communication beyond the moneyed to the masses. People could write things down more easily, preserving ideas and recording history.

“Previous systems had hundreds or even thousands of characters, but when the alphabet was introduced, people only had to learn 20-40 characters,” explains Glenn Schwartz, a Near Eastern archaeologist at Johns Hopkins University who, along with researchers from the University of Amsterdam, unearthed the tomb at Umm el-Marra. Schwartz, who studies the emergence of urban societies in Syria and Mesopotamia, presented the research last month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.

The idea that our humdrum A-Z could be connected to four finger-sized tubes buried for more than four millennia in a Syrian tomb captivates for several reasons. For one, the cylinders feature small holes, as if once threaded with string; one suggestion is that they may have been gift tags. They were found near ceramic vessels; the cylinders may have been labels indicating the food or drink within, donated to sustain the dead in the afterlife. As I struggle to nail my Christmas shopping, I wonder whether, all those millennia ago, those who picked out these funerary gifts similarly wrestled over the appropriateness of their choices.

The find also illustrates how the wheels of enlightenment can turn slowly: Schwartz found the cylinders in 2004 and published papers on them in 2010 and 2021, but there was little buzz until last month’s talk (he admits to having been wary about pushing the idea, given his lack of expertise in early alphabets). Now, some scholars of early writing systems are publicly discussing what the decades-old discovery may mean: that a form of alphabet appeared 500 years earlier than previously thought.

Each character in an alphabet represents a phoneme, often described as the smallest unit of sound in a language; they include vowels and consonants. Phonemes are strung together to make words. Schwartz and colleagues noticed that the symbols — one looks like a distorted paper clip, another like an upside-down V — seemed comparable to the earliest known alphabet, called Proto-Sinaitic. It is thought to have been created around 1900 BCE by people living in the Sinai Peninsula, in what is now Egypt. One of the cylinders looks to be inscribed with the word “silanu”, possibly the family name of the gift-giver or recipient.

He points to other clues suggestive of an alphabet: the longer the series of symbols, the more likely it is to be writing; the same symbols appearing elsewhere in different order are similarly indicative. Silvia Ferrara, a professor of early languages at the University of Bologna, told Scientific American that she believed the cylinders were indeed evidence of an alphabet; Philippa Steele of Cambridge university suggests there is currently insufficient evidence to be sure, with the resemblance to other scripts possibly down to chance.

If the cylinders show what Schwartz thinks they do — robust confirmation depends on other samples coming to light — it not only changes the timeline for the origin story of the alphabet but also the geography. As convention has it, the alphabet, which democratised writing, was first developed by speakers of Semitic languages who were living in Egypt and inspired by its writing system. The existence of the cylinders suggests this critical shift instead happened far away, in Syria, with the two regions connected via trade.

Given the turmoil of the past week, it is hard not to marvel at life’s twists. This is a region of the world more familiar today for conflict than for early calligraphy. Now, Syria might be home to the first alphabet — not the humdrum A-Z but a piece of humankind’s shared heritage that matters beyond words.

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