Evidence of oldest known alphabet unearthed among Syrian tomb treasures

Clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria and dated to 4,400 years ago are inscribed with traces of the earliest known alphabetic writing system, an analysis suggests.

The tomb was discovered in Umm el-Marra near Aleppo in 2004 and contained human remains and other objects from the Early Bronze Age (2600–2150 bc). The items included four clay cylinders, each about the size of a finger, engraved with eight distinct symbols.

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“These inscriptions might rekindle the idea of the location of where we have the earliest alphabet,” says Chris Dobbs-Allsopp, who studies the Old Testament and Semitic languages at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

Archaeologist Glenn Schwartz at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who co-led the excavation and analysed the inscriptions, now suggests that the symbols represent sounds that correspond to a, i, k, l, n, s and y.

The characters do not correspond to a known language, but Schwartz compared them with characters used in West Semitic languages — including ancient and modern forms of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic — to decode them. The inscriptions might record people’s names or label objects in the tomb, said Schwartz, who presented his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research in Boston, Massachusetts, on 21 November.

Tomb treasures

Archaeologists found the cylinders in one of ten tombs in Umm el-Marra. The burial areas also contained gold jewellery, silver vessels, an ivory comb and pottery. “Judging from their contents, these tombs belonged to people of the highest social rank,” Schwartz said at the meeting.

The cylinders are each one centimetre thick and 4.7 centimetres long, pierced with a small lengthwise hole. In 2021, using radiocarbon dating, Schwartz and his team determined¹ that the tubes originate from around 2400 bc. “It’s 500 years earlier than any other early alphabetic inscription we have. So that’s surprising,” says Dobbs-Allsopp.