What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.The discovery of alphabetic writing in the third millennium BCE would be a major and unanticipated development. I am very interested in what Northest Semitic epigraphers make of the objects.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.
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The discoverer, Johns Hopkins Professor Glenn Schwartz, will be giving a paper on the objects today at the ASOR annnual meeting in Boston.
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