8d ago in General discussion
Oldest known alphabet unearthed in ancient Syrian city
According to this news release, researchers have found an even older alphabetic writing in a tomb from Syria:
The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations.
“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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Oldest known alphabet unearthed in ancient Syrian city
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