For decades, it was believed that the first alphabet was created by the ancient Egyptians. However, a shocking new discovery has called this assumption into question, pushing back the timeline of the earliest known alphabetic writing system by approximately 500 years.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, claim to have found the oldest known alphabetic texts engraved on small clay tablets.
These finger-sized, cylindrical tablets were uncovered in a burial site from the Early Bronze Age in the city of Umm el-Marra—one of the oldest locations in the Middle East, where bustling trade routes once intersected.
What Did the Archaeologists Discover?
Professor Glen Schwartz, who has led the excavations for 16 years, noted, “The alphabet changed the way people lived, thought, and communicated. This discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in different places than we previously imagined.”
“Previously, scholars believed that the alphabet was invented in Egypt or nearby sometime after 1900 BCE,” Professor Schwartz explained. “But the artifacts found by his team are older and come from a different area on the map, suggesting that the alphabet may have a completely different origin story than we thought.”
Radiocarbon dating helped to clarify the timeline of this research. It revealed that the tablets were produced around 2400 BCE, making these text samples approximately 500 years older than any other ancient examples of writing, as reported by the Daily Mail.
In addition to the text tablets, archaeologists discovered six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, pottery, a spearhead, and intact ceramic jugs in the tombs of Umm el-Marra.
As for the purpose of the cylindrical tablets, the lead researcher believes they served as primitive versions of modern labels. He suggested that the perforated tablets could have been tied to jugs to inform buyers about the contents, the producer, the place of origin, or the destination. As Professor Schwartz pointed out, before the alphabet emerged, early writing systems like hieroglyphs were extremely difficult to learn. “There were thousands of symbols that were very complicated to use, so only a very small group of people could learn to write and read,” he said.