Credit: Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University

In western Syria, archaeologists believe they have unearthed evidence of the earliest use of an alphabet in the world.

The site, called Tell Umm el-Marra was an important urban center in Syria and one of the first to ever pop up in the region. It’s been under excavation for 16 years.

In one of the best-preserved tombs—remarkably unlooted—dating from the Early Bronze Age, 6 skeletons were found alongside grave goods and four, small, perforated clay cylinders.

Stamped on the cylinders seems to be some form of Semitic alphabet, but carbon dating revealed the clay to be around 500 years older than the previous oldest recorded alphabetic script.

“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.”

“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.”

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The earliest forms of the Semitic alphabet come from the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, discovered in 1905 on the Sinai Peninsula of which 20 to 40 examples exist. These are believed to represent a state of writing between the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the North Semitic alphabet.

However, as Schwartz explains, these new clay cylinders date to the 20th century BCE at the latest, 500 years before the Sinaitic inscriptions were carved.

“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.”

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