The clay cylinders were found in a tomb containing six skeletons. Glenn Schwartz / Johns Hopkins UniversityA few decades ago, researchers discovered four small clay cylinders marked with strange symbols at an ancient tomb in Syria. Theyve now concluded that those symbols are lettersand they may be the worlds oldest known evidence of alphabetic writing.The tomb is located inTell Umm-el Marra, an ancient city some 35 miles east of Aleppo. Researchers fromJohns Hopkins University and theUniversity of Amsterdam found the marked cylinders in 2004, and Johns Hopkins archaeologistGlenn Schwartz described them in apaper in 2021. But according to Scientific Americans Stephanie Pappas, the research didnt attract widespread attention until this week, when Schwartz presented it at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research.Before the invention of alphabets, early writing systemslikehieroglyphs and cuneiformused symbols representing objects or phonetic sounds. Eventually,Proto-Sinaitic script, which transformed some hieroglyphs into alphabetic letters, emerged in the Sinai Peninsula around 1900 B.C.E.Scholars have long thought that this was when the alphabet was invented, as Schwartz says in astatement. 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.Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that the cylinders were made around 2400 B.C.E., which would make them about 500 years older than other known alphabetic scripts. If the cylinders markings are alphabetic letters, they represent a pivotal shift in humans development of language.As Schwartz tellsMcClatchys Irene Wright, older writing systems could feature thousands of characters or symbols representing full words, syllables or combinations of phonemesthe smallest sound segments that languages have. Alphabetic systems are much simpler: They contain only 20 to 30 characters, since thats the usual maximum number of phonemes a language will use.Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite, says Schwartz in the statement. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated. Researchers think the cylinders could have been labels. Glenn Schwartz / Johns Hopkins UniversityThe tomb in Tell Umm-el Marra contained six skeletonslikely members of a wealthy and powerful family. It also held cookware, jewelry, a spearhead and pottery vessels. The clay cylinders were found alongside these artifacts. Each cylinder sports a small hole, which may have been used to attach them to something.Im imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label, says Schwartz in the statement. Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to.Schwartz tells Scientific American that one of the clay cylinders is marked with the word Silanu, which he thinks may be a name: Perhaps Silanu was the sender or recipient of the grave goods, and the clay cylinder might have been attached to a vessel like a gift tag. But without a way to translate the writing, researchers can only guess.Schwartz says that several prominent scholars have also agreed that the characters are part of an alphabet, according to Newsweeks Aristos Georgiou. However, this conclusion is not universally accepted. Some researchers say theyre still hoping for more evidence that the symbols arent from another kind of old writing system.When you only have a few very short inscriptions, it can be difficult to tell how many signs the system has, as Philippa Steele, a classicist at theUniversity of Cambridge, tells Scientific American. She cant be sure the engravings match Proto-Sinaitic writing rather than just resemble it. I think we have to hope for more finds.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Ancient Civilizations, Ancient Egypt, Archaeology, Artifacts, Cool Finds, History, Language, linguistics , New Research