Latest on on those 3rd-millennium alphabetic (?) inscriptions

UPDATE: What was the first alphabet in the world? New discoveries challenge old ideas about the earliest alphabets (Tom Metcalfe, Live Science).

With so many ancient texts around the world, you might wonder which alphabet was the first to be developed. In other words, what is the oldest confirmed alphabet in the world?

Experts told Live Science it was probably the proto-Sinaitic script, which was invented about 4,000 years ago by Canaanite workers at an Egyptian turquoise mine in the Sinai region. The proto-Sinaitic script developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which, in turn, inspired the early Hebrew, Greek and Roman alphabets.

However, a November 2024 discovery by researchers at Johns Hopkins University suggested that an alphabetic script was being used hundreds of years earlier, in what is now northern Syria. Their evidence is four clay cylinders, each about as long as a finger, from a Bronze Age tomb at Umm el-Marra, near Aleppo.

[...]

PaleoJudaica has already posted on this story here, here, and here. This article notes responses from additional specialists. The mood still seems to be cautious.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.