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This discovery caused the alphabet to emerge 500 years ago and shook up the most accepted versions of its invention.
A popular interpretation is that the first alphabet first appeared in Egypt, about 3,800 years ago, when about 20 Egyptian hieroglyphs were transformed into the first letters of the alphabet. This script was later used to write the words of at least one ancient Southwest Asian language.
But objects from the roughly 4,300-year-old site of Umm el-Marra in Syria are incompatible with such a narrative. While excavating there in 2004, Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his colleagues found four pieces of clay the size and shape of a human finger. One to five characters were imprinted on the clay fingers, and Schwartz has been trying to understand them for the past 17 years.
“When I first saw them, I thought, it reminds me of a writing,” Schwartz recalls, but it was nothing like the dentistry of the time and place.
Considering and rejecting other possibilities, that is, symbols belonging to the Indus civilization, Schwartz argues that the symbols may be letters of the primitive alphabet. In his opinion, there are versions of the letters A, L, O and K, although it is not clear which word is made up of the letters.
Some early alphabet researchers were surprised by this discovery. If these clay figurines are as old as claimed, “they sweep away current theories of the invention of the alphabet,” says Aaron Koller of Yeshiva University in New York.
Koller speculates that Schwartz somehow misrepresented the artifacts and that they are in fact some 1,000 years younger, although Schwartz is convinced that they actually are not.
Benjamin Sass of Tel Aviv University in Israel raises another possibility. According to him, the symbols of Umm el-Marra, whatever they mean, do not resemble the first signs of the alphabet and therefore do not threaten existing ideas of the invention of the alphabet.
But John Darnell of Yale University is more open to the idea of an older alphabet. “All writing certainly has a prehistory, so the signs published by Schwartz can really represent such a thing,” he says.
There is evidence that there was trade between Egypt and ancient cities in what is now northern Syria 4,300 years ago, says Schwartz, so it cannot be ruled out that the alphabet originated in Egypt and then moved north to Umm el -Marra.
No matter how things happened then, it is now generally accepted that the alphabet did not become the official writing system in any political state before ~ 3,200 years ago. This shows that it has been broadcast many times̃ as an informal script, not used by kings or powerful elites.
The second discovery belongs to Felix Höflmayer of the Austrian Institute of Archeology and his colleagues: they found an alphabetical entry in a pottery fragment dating back to the second half of this informal period. They discovered a 3,450-year-old record, of just six letters, near the border of the ancient city of Tel Lachish in Israel.
“With more and more examples of this type of writing, we can try to find out the social circumstances in which [ši abėcėlė] it survived, ”says Höflmayer.
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