The history of the alphabet in human writing may have changed with the discovery of a clay cylinder in a tomb in Tell Umm-el Marra, Syria. The finger-length cylinder features three never-before-seen alphabets. Carbon-14 dating has shown it to be made around 2400 BC, making it 500 years older than the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, which is believed to have been created around 1900 BC.
The 4,400-year-old cylinder was discovered in 2004 and the paper was published in 2021. But the study, by archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam, only gained attention when it was presented at the American Society of Overseas Research event last week.
There are four letters inscribed on the cylinder, with a hole in the middle. Researchers have hypothesized that the cylinder was placed on an object to indicate what was inside the jar or to mark the owner's name. The meaning of the words spelled by the alphabet is still unknown.
This discovery will cause our understanding of the origins of the alphabet to be reexamined. It has long been believed that the origins of the alphabet are through Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Alphabets are different from Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphs because each represents a different sound. Egyptian Hieroglyphs, for example, use symbols to represent objects.