Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
hub.jhu.edu
hub.jhu.edu
Sailing 100,000 BCE
Drawing 73,000 BCE
Counting 60,000 BCE
Medicine 40,000 BCE
…
Writing 3,200 BCE
Alphabet 2,400 BCE
I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing. I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the example of monuments. They're not all that rare though. Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the world war memorials that every little English town seems to have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the paint that they put on it.
So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had writing.
This article says that the earliest proto-writing is 10,000 years old - 3-d clay counters used for accounting. What was earlier?
https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing...
* a script which can represent taxes, histories, and religious texts but not the full range of verbal expression
* programming languages
* emojis
The first of these is an actual scholarly debate about whether Aztec script can be considered "full" writing or merely proto-writing.
Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked!
1: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-glob...
Interesting - where is that from?
The Wikipedia article on Rock Art contains a lot of discussion on the meaning of ancient drawings, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art
More recently, medieval painting has a lot of symbolism modern audiences can no longer “read”.
What started as a ad-hoc system of tellies, eventually evolved into a fully-fledged writing system. And once the accountants had a functioning writing system, it would have been obviously useful, and moved into other parts of society. Tax records, laws, contracts, long-distance messages, recording history.
Art was probably one of the last places in society actually take advantage of this new writing technology.
Hunter-gatherer societies didn't develop writing because they didn't need accountants.
As for the effort, the most would be expanded on preserving monumental projects glorifying the rulers etc. But, again, in the historical record, this shows up later than accounting records.
Imagine having to engrave anything you write in clay, stone, wood, etc. One reason runic alphabets are shaped that way is because it's easier to carve in straight lines (iirc).
How many comments would there be on a HN page if that was required?
Ancient Sumerians in modern Iraq area used cuneiform. The cut tip of a reed was used to make marks in in wet clay which was quite a rapid way to write. There are even old practice tablets with scribblings of children in school learning to write.
The reason they still exist is fire. A wood building burned at some point and the fire caused the clay tablets to harden like in a kiln preserving them.
In modern Inda/Pakistan region Harappan culture also used clay Indus script but it was more elaborate and not as "wordy". It seems mainly clay tags to attach to goods to identify them.
But the reason we have very ancient evidence of writing is categorically not because they were baked in ancient times.
The problem is that many of these options are expensive in a pre-industrial society. In places where the writing material was cheap and readily available, and where writing was socially beneficial, you see much more "mundane" writing show up - e.g. in the Novgorod merchant republic, birch bark was apparently cheap enough for kids to doodle on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim).
I remember an article about credit in stores in tiny towns in Spain. It was just a rod of wood with some simbol as a signature of the store. Each time you buy something ¿big? they add a mark, and when you get all the ¿10? marks you have to pay with real money.
IIRC, the oldest number recorded was some kind of lunar calendar in a bone, wit marks like
IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIIII IIIIIII
IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII IIIIIII
And then you use the picture of an apple, bear, etc.
It's one of those simple solutions that anyone could have, but not often do.
Given how many humans did come up with it, over all those millennia, I think we all can safely say that!
I've sometimes idly wondered if I was transported back in time to the stone age, could I help the tribe by teaching them to read and write? Sadly, nope.
If I was transported to Roman times, I'd try to invent paper and a printing press. I bet it would catch on fast.
The printing press might've been useful though.
I sometimes wonder if the development of the printing press relied on technology that hadn't been available previously - like many/most innovations. But what?
Paper? There were ink-retaining sheets long before the printing press. A durable mechanism for the roller? They made wagon axles, I assume, that supported much more weight. Durable letters? Even sans metal, I'd guess that carving wood letters would still be worth the effort.
He used lead letters. Lead was readily available in Roman times - after all, the water pipes were made of lead (and poisoned the people who used them).
The lead letters would quickly wear out, but it was easy to melt and recast them as needed. I've seen a demonstration of it.
I think the Chinese did wood block printing, but it didn't get very far.
After much thinking about it, providing a printing press would be the most effective invention to bootstrap a modern society. And, well, that's exactly what happened after Gutenberg invented it. The greatest inventions in history are:
1. writing
2. phonetic alphabet
3. paper
4. printing
5. networks
And the pattern is obvious!
I can't get myself to link to the marketing blurb inspired summaries, but I love the book. This wikipedia heading gives a less breathless overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Kelly_(science_writer)#R...
What's so hard to believe? Everything you can write you can say, and you can show quite a lot that's difficult to describe in writing.
That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl.
One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion.
That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc.
So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like:
: ;-) WINK NOSE SMILE ; // Pronounced "winkie".The first Egyptian pyramid known was built ~2780 BCE, the alphabetic writing in this article was from ~2500 BCE. That’s a gap of ~250 years, not ~2,500.
> How do you coordinate something that massive without any form of writing?
The Egyptians at the time of the Pyramids had writing, but it was logographic (symbols directly represent a word/concept), not alphabetic (a small inventory of symbols are combined in different ways to represent words/concepts.)
An alphabetic – and also phonetic – script is a big advance not because of what you communicate with it, but because if you know a fairly small set of symbols and their phonetic interpretation, you can encode a spoken language in it in a reasonably intelligible way to anyone who knows the same script (and you can even encode different spoken languages in the same script intelligibly, if they have a similar-enough phonetic inventory.)
Aztec, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and their contemporaries all used some type of paper. Sumerians seem to be alone in their use of clay for writing.
I think we have more Assyrian and Hittite tablets that have survived?
Also they were used as fast Crete and Greece and even in the Danubian civilizations (although they probably didn't develop a full writing system).
When I was much younger I used to work as a hike leader for a summer camp in Virginia. We would take a small group of teenagers out for 7 day hikes, during which we could cover something between 70 to 90 miles (112 to 145 kilometers). At one time I knew that stretch of trail so well I thought I could walk it blindfolded. And yet, I only knew it in the summer. One year I went in the fall and I was astonished how different it was. I was helped by the markings on the trees. (This was before cell phones and GPS.)
Territorial animals that we are, I'd add "here starts the territory of the Saber-Toothed Tiger Clan" signs to path markings as likely candidates for earliest symbolic communication.
Nice to see that the earliest examples of writing are still somewhat recognizable (as opposed to modern alphabets) - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing - a hand, a foot, a goat or sheep.
Fun thing is, with modern technology we have regressed (advanced?) to a massive use of pictograms - a modern smartphone wielding human, in addition to the alphabet, knows at least a few hundreds or even thousands of pictograms ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm with you until we get to alphabetic writing, which has (to our knowledge) only been invented once. To get from other writing systems to an alphabet requires a few conceptual leaps which are much more challenging and, I would suggest, not fluent.
If it were a smooth path, we ought to have seen alphabetic scripts arise independently multiple times (as we have other forms of writing).
Why would you suggest the opposite? I'm a complete layperson in this area, so I understand my view might be quite limited.
If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).
There's also Thaana, the script used for Maldivian, which uses some Arabic script symbols, as well as Indic digits. So while it's semi-alphabetic (partly abugida), and it's derived from existing writing systems, it uses the borrowed symbols in unique ways.
There are other syllabic writing systems as well, like Inuktitut and Cree, but those were created by missionaries familiar with other writing systems.
It is my understanding that Hangul is believed to have been influenced by other alphabetic writing (e.g. Phagspa) which themselves descended from the original alphabet. Though it was a distinct creation, the core alphabetic idea was not independently discovered.
> If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).
Syllabic writing systems are significantly less powerful than the alphabet (hence why they have generally been superceded by alphabetic ones).
They have been invented multiple times, so you can argue the smooth slope goes up to syllabic writing, sure. But only once has that led to an alphabet.
> There's also Thaana
I hadn't heard of this, but Wikipedia seems to suggest it's descended from Phoenician like everything else (although it has made the step from abjad -> alphabet).
Egyptian Pyramids - 3,800 BCE
They were writing just not with an alphabet
Note that war and conquest of neighbors means managing (in particular, taxing) a large foreign-speaking population, whereby abjads and alphabets also come in handy. Not to mention the monuments - if you are a king erecting, say, a monumental stele to boast about having vanquished a mighty foreign ruler, it might behoove you to spell his name in a way that is sufficiently recognizable for people to appreciate the achievement.
* 39.2%: No writing
* 37.1%: Pictures only
* 23.7%: Writing
> I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we think turns out to be especially unreliable.
[0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969)
[1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press (1976)
I have family that just returned from a 2 year religious mission in pohnpei. The native language there is just barely starting to be written. One of the challenges to learning it is because of it's mostly unwritten nature, the language evolves rapidly. That fast evolution is part of what makes turning the language into a written language difficult.
The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th century so that they could write a bible for Slavic countries.
Blew my mind that they didn’t have an alphabet before that.
Cyril and Methodius (who created the Glagolithic Alphabet, not the Cyrillic alphabet) weren't even the first Chritian missionaries who created a new alphabet for a language that didn't have on in order to spread Christianity. I believe the first one was Armenian (in the early 5th century).
Yet with all that, the spoken language remains unwritten. That's just wild to me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohnpeian_language
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuukese_language
See the "phonology" and "orthography" sections of the respective articles. It seems like both have a standard orthography.
Perhaps my family member confused the fact that the religion had no training materials for the language with there being no written version of the language. (I'm admittedly ignorant about this, I just had a conversation with them on Saturday)
I wonder if the language isn't as commonly written as it is spoken?
A bit similarly: English uses the Latin alphabet mainly because, as I recall, after the fall of Rome the Christian church was doing much of the writing in (England? Wales? British Isles?), and they adapted the Latin alphabet to the local languages.
Cyrillic was a later iteration by the Slavs themselves - Bulgarians, to be precise - where those new shapes were mostly replaced with Greek letters (except where there was no direct equivalent), presumably because those guys were translating a lot of Greek books, and having similar alphabets for both Greek and Church Slavonic made things easier.
You need writing for organizing large groups of people and such. You dont need it for survival necessities.
However, (and adding to the other replies here which also have a point) in Plato's Phaidros Socrates places the invention of writing in Egypt [1], not in some mind-blowingly past aeon, and the undertone of the tale is that civilization can (and reach) pretty interesting levels of sophistication before writing becomes a necessity.
The start of the Timaeus features an eight thousand year old Egyptian city with an eight thousand year long memory. It also says that Athens is even older, but that it's periodically destroyed by natural disasters, losing its history and technology. Writing is mentioned as one of the things lost:
> Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.
Egyptian hieroglyphics were already thousands of years old at the time! I think the myth in the Phaidros was meant to be understood as taking place in a mind-blowingly past aeon.
However, such systems would need to be widely adopted and durably preserved to survive millennia and eventually be rediscovered.
Which is how we happen to know the precious little that we do know about past writing systems.
I don't find it that reasonable an assumption. As far as I know, there is no hunter-gatherer society that has developed writing, except societies who have had contact with a sedentary agricultural civilisation with writing.
Given that all human societies for which there's evidence were hunter-gatherers until about 10k years ago, to me it seems more reasonable to conclude they had no writing.
Now, you might say that agriculture and civilisation were around earlier, but we dhaven't found the evidence. But we do have evidence of plenty of human groups at those earlier times, and they're all hunter-gatherers.
Why?
You can communicate and remember a lot orally. The Polynesian navigators encoded information about how to navigate from island to island in oral poems passed down generation to generation. A lot of these traditions seem to vanish once a culture gets writing, leaving it unclear how they used to pass on so much information before.
Also, sailing without counting doesn't get you very far, because for instance you may run out of food or water. While early sailing was predominantly coastal, that doesn't mean an easy pit-stop whenever you get hungry or thirsty (due to rocky coastlines, dangerous currents and waves, and prevailing winds). Probably a lot of early boats were destroyed coming ashore.
Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that.
The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese characters or Korean hangul, for example.
Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system. This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the Turkish language.
So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught to read and write Turksih in a matter of months.
I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds.
Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on board with anything that makes that easier.
Abjads are no more or less complicated than alphabets though. They're just a bad fit for Turkish.
However, phonotactics place some practical limits on that. If your language only has (C)V syllables with a fairly limited phonemic inventory - e.g. Japanese - a syllabary is small enough, and even if letter shapes for related syllables aren't consistent, is easy enough to learn. OTOH if you routinely have, say, 3-consonant clusters (as in e.g. the word SCRipt), you quickly get combinatorial explosion.
To some extent this can be mitigated by alphasyllabaries like Hangul, where syllables are clearly marked in writing but still composed of some more fundamental units. Still, you can only cram so many tiny elements into a single glyph that is still distinct. Hangul actually used to have standard syllable blocks for all combinations of three consonants in the onset, and those are already very hard to read.
Syllable based writing are not intuitive for human, Korean found it the hard way by relatively recently by inventing Hangul alphabets despite had been using the Chinese characters for several thousands of years previously with majority of the people remained illiterate.
This is based on multiple sources online. Here is one example source (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_gu...
Fun facts, as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in one single day, and then you can read the Korean written words for names, sign boards, etc but to understand them you need to learn the Korean language. However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
"Around 1809, impressed by the "talking leaves" of European written languages, Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create a character for each word, Sequoyah realized this would be too difficult and eventually created characters to represent syllables. He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created."
"After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society. By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography."
They literally achieved higher literacy than the european settlers
Is there any hard evidence behind that claim? (Not necessarily questioning it, it would just be very fascinating to read it)
Second paragraph, with a citation actually (but as always with WP, who knows how much of it is actually in the book)
Further, Hangul is not "syllabic". It's an alphabet. It happens to organise its letters into syllable blocks, but that's it.
What is true that unlike the Latin alphabet, which European languages could adopt/adapt for their own use (or think the way Cyrillic was adapted for Mongolian), Chinese characters, being logographic, couldn't simply be repurposed to represent sounds of the Korean tongue — that's why Hangul had to be invented from scratch. That's one important difference between phonological and logographic writing systems, but it has little do with the question which system is better at spreading literacy.
By his own account, it took this man [1] 7 years (during his late 40s/early 50s) achieving English literacy, and that happened in a English speaking country where he encounters English texts on a daily basis (I assume your friend lives & works in the West).
The genius of Hangul is that it is an alphasyllabary, so it provides the benefits of both - regularity and human friendliness.
Swahili uses either modified Latin or modified Arabic for writing. Are you perhaps thinking of one of the invented scripts for indigenous American languages, e.g., Cree syllabics or Inuktitut?
For instance, the phoneme /t/ is always rendered by the English letter /t/, but that phoneme can be rendered in so many different ways. In an initial position it would be rendered as an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive [tʰ], equivalent to the Korean Jamo ㅌ in initial or intervocalic positions. An English /t/ in other positions is generally not aspirated, but besides that the rendition is highly dependent on the speaker's accent. MRP ("BBC English") speakers render a "final" /t/ (i.e. after a vowel or consonant, but not before another vowel) as as [ʔt] ([t] sound preceded by a glottal stopped) or even just as a pure glottal stop [ʔ]. In intervocalic position RP speakers would keep /t/ as a simple [t] sound, but most Americans would change this sound into a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ]. Cockney speakers famously change an intervocalic /t/ into a glottal stop (so you'd get something that sounds like "woh-ah" for "water") and I didn't even get into how /t/ behaves when it follows other consonants such as the elided /t/ in "listen" or the way some American speakers pronounce "winter".
In all honesty, this is probably just as messy as what happens in Korean, it's just that the Korean allophones are more foreign to us. Besides ᄋ, all the variations are regular allophones. As far as I understand ᄋ was indeed just reused for two different purposes (there is no /ŋ/ phoneme that transforms to an empty sound in initial position).
I'd say that one thing that still makes Hangul hard, is that a lot of consonant clusters sounds sound the same when they come in final position. It makes pronunciation regular, but it's a bit hard to know how to transcribe many words. The vowels ㅐ and ㅔ are also pronounced the same in most (perhaps all?) modern Korean dialects, but that's a small irregularity compared to the redundancies of many other alphabetic writing systems.
In short, Hangul is much more regular than most alphabets. I wouldn't say it is the most regular though — it's hard to beat new writing systems designed by professional linguists for small language that didn't have an alphabet before. Hangul is still an relatively older system that had to go through writing reforms, but still retrains some spelling complexities. And if you compare Korean to Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, with their extremely simple phonology and phonotactics (they have very few vowels and consonants and generally don't allow consonant clusters and final consonants at all) - then the writing system of these languages is much simpler — and almost all of them use the Latin alphabet with a highly regular orthography.
I think there is a more impressive trait of Hangul, that is highly underappreciated. It's an alphabetic writing system that blends very well with traditional Chinese characters. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic (i.e. they represent a single syllable) and while that property is not maintained in Japanese (due to its vastly different phonology), it has been maintained in Korean and Vietnamese. Hangul lets you write each syllable with a single graphic block (even if that block contains multiple "Jamo" letters). All other alphabet systems that have been developed in languages that used Chinese characters (Such as Pinyin, Zhuyin or the Vietnamese alphabet) do not share this property. This means that when you try to add some alphabet letters into a document written Chinese characters, the result is extremely unpleasant typographically. It is not only harder to typeset nicely, but it's also quite painful to read.
Although Modern Korean doesn't blend Hangul and Hanja (Chinese characters) very often, I think this property made Hangul quite a lot more palatable as a replacement for Chinese characters in Korea compared to Pinyin or Zhuyin. Koreans didn't have to throw your entire typographic and calligraphic tradition in order to adopt Hangul: A block is fixed-size (not proportional), the writing is easier to read both vertically and horizontally and you can keep writing it with brush strokes using traditional Chinese calligraphic methods and practices. It can even be mixed nicely with Chinese characters like Japanese Kana (and it would be more compact than Japanese Kana). Eventually Korean language reformers have chosen to mostly drop Hanja altogether, but when you still do need to mix Hanja in a Korean text, you can do it seamlessly.
He replied something like "I don't believe in the thaumaturgical power of icons" and that has stayed with me forever since. Words may he worth 1/1000th of a picture but at least you understand them.
Proof that icons don't work.
The idea that everything should be immediately intuitive is ridiculous. Babies have to learn how to properly suck a nipple and how to chew food in order to eat. Why should we expect mastery of a much more complex tool to be immediate?
The smiley was invented because a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job expressing emotions, especially in short isolated sentences.
Emojis are overused in some current contexts (smartphone/messaging addiction) but some sort of standardization along with "emoji" literacy is, in principle, an evolution of the alphabet towards more sophistication and nuance.
I used emojis for a while, then got kinda sick of them.
> a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job expressing emotions
Instead of a smiley emoji, I'll write "haha". Instead of a barf emoji, I write "barf". English has a million words in it. I'm sure you can find a variety of words that express emotions just fine.
?! being a form of picture writing? I don't see it.
Thank you to the commenters who pointed this out!
If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.
If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the script, and at the form of the glyphs. So:
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes. ("Language is made of sounds.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of sounds, and some of them are more important than others.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables. ("Language is made of things you can say.")
You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually distinct parts, but those parts have no independent representation. (Compare the glyphs ሀ ለ ሐ with the related glyphs ሄ ሌ ሔ.) ("Language is made of things you can say, but there are patterns.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well, is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more, that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
That’s literally in the title of both the post and the article. What are you “clarifying”?
I am still not fully clear actually -- Alphabet being a finite set of symbols, how did pre-alphabetic writing work?
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm
If you wanted to tell people you "learned cuneiform" you could memorize this in an afternoon!
The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
You might want this one: http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
> I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).
> My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive
So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
So if all of the handful of fragments have marks that look like actual alphabetic symbols that were actually used in that area (later), that's substantially stronger evidence than you're giving credit for.
Not sure if this is good example since we know that Greek alphabet really is writing.
-----
Count of symbol types is what you'd look at. You have a bunch of unknown symbols, so there's nothing else you can look at.
For comparison:
Japanese hiragana: ~71 symbols [*]
Cherokee syllabary: ~86 symbols
Greek alphabet: ~24 symbols
Latin alphabet: ~21 symbols ( https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/graffito/AGP-EDR187776 )
[*] Many Japanese syllables are spelled with digraphs ("sh", if the "h" appeared in a special combining form) or diacritics ("è", if è and e were completely distinct sounds, as they are in French), which lowers the memory burden. I've counted diacritics as creating new symbols and digraphs as not doing so.
The Indus script research findings on it being a script was so controversial that the researcher had a death threat upon him based on the discovery.
I think the OP article author is wrong by claiming it's the oldest while it should be the Indus script but perhaps they considered the latter as symbols like Chinese characters not strictly alphabets [1].
[1] Indus script:
We have plenty of examples of pottery with markings on it that aren't alphabets. Cuneiform obviously, but also simply tradesman marks like the predecessors to the Indus script. What makes this "seem like alphabetic writing" as opposed to any of the other kinds of clay markings we've seen at the time? There are only four objects bearing the markings, with nothing else to compare against, in a supposedly "unknown" language!
If this really is an alphabet: what did it develop from? Where are the cultures who used it? And why did no one in the region ever use anything like it again?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
I don't take beef with the possibility of an earlier alphabet that predates the Proto-Canaanite alphabet — that is entirely plausible. But I think the article is overselling the story. The evidence is not very strong at this point, and I although I can be wrong, I suspect it can never be with if we remain with just four very short inscriptions without external context.
It is important to clarify the vast difference between this and the decipherment of Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I think the myth and magic of the Rosetta stone is overemphasized in popular culture, so just a few points of difference between the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and scripts like the Indus Valley Script or Linear A.
- Of course, to start with we did have the Rosetta Stone, and we have no equivalent for these scripts. But the Rosetta Stone was rediscovered in 1799, while Champollion provided the first phonetic interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs only two and half decades later, in 1822. But even after Champollion's famous achievement, we weren't able to read most hieroglyphic texts yet! Champollion didn't realize that many phonetic hieroglyphs represent not just a single consonant, but often two or three different consonants! It took a couple of more decades until we Egyptian was fully deciphered.
- We knew exactly which culture and language the Egyptian Hieroglyphs belonged to. More importantly, we had a vast wealth of external historical sources about this culture that we could read: mostly in Greek, Hebrew, Roman and Aramaic. From these sources we knew the names of Egyptian kings that we could expect to find in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we knew enough about Egyptian culture, religion and history to often guess what the texts would be talking about. This is not anywhere nearly as true for the Indus Valley Script! Since we don't know who their kings were, we cannot use the names of kings as a highly verifiable way to test the phonetic writing hypothesis.
- We had a vast quantity of Hieroglyphs inscriptions. There are fewer attested Indus Valley Script inscriptions, but the number should be enough if we just had other external clues.
- Egyptian still had a (barely-)living descendant (Coptic) at the time Champollion and other scholars were working on its decipherment. Coptic priests and AFAIK even native speakers have provided a lot of help them in understanding how the Egyptian language they were trying to decipher might sound and work.
What is their evidence and argument for it?
All good points, and my sense of it also is that it's pre-writing, but it might be that additional material just hasn't yet been discovered. Linear A and PS are known from a very, very few inscriptions.
A decent summary is the blog post below from another researcher who briefly was part of the same dig and a former student of Schwartz (so not entirely independent):
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
It is worth noting that in the past Schwartz has been reluctant to affirm that the four inscribed clay cylinders from Tomb 4 of Umm el-Marra are alphabetic (Schwartz 2010). Thus, he certainly did not rush to this conclusion. Moreover, his most recent article about these is also very cautious (Schwartz 2021), as he moves through various possibilities (as discussed above). But it is clear that he is now willing to state that this is the most reasonable position (i.e., it is Early Alphabetic). And I concur. That is, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Umm el-Marra clay cylinders are inscribed with signs that are most readily understood as Early Alphabetic letters (graphemes). Moreover, since the Early Alphabetic alphabet was used to write Semitic, it is logical to conclude that this is the language of the Umm el-Marra inscriptions (the fact that they were found in Syria would also augment this conclusion, of course).
The full blog post is worth reading and summarizes the case for various non-alphabetic possibilities.
Besides that, this blog post mentions some morphological characteristics of the inscriptions that make the author believe the writing is alphabetic, but it fails to mention these characteristics. I don't doubt Rollston has good reasons for this statement, but the claims behind them need to be published and reviewed. I'm not sure if this is the case (and I do not have access to the 2021 article).
[1] This includes the Lachish Dagger I tried to look up, but its dating seems disputed, but even the earliest proposed date (the 17th century) is more recent than the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, so I'm not entirely sure what it is supposed to prove, except perhaps an earlier spread of the Alphabet from Egypt and the Sinai peninsula to Canaan proper?
That's because it's not a strong conclusion. It's a "better than the alternatives" hypothesis. Repeating my tldr above "they don't know it's alphabetic".
> doesn't bring any EVIDENCE .. some morphological characteristics of the inscriptions
I'd say the "morphological characteristics of the inscriptions" count as evidence and I'll just recap everything linked that I think counts as evidence: the graphemes include several repetitions even with only 12 signs in total; they don't resemble cuneiform at all; they have a weak resemblances to some Egyptian glyphs but weak and Egypt didn't have these clay cigars; they have a weak resemblance to some Indus glyphs and (later) Byblos glyphs but again weak; they don't appear to be numbers, potmarks, etc.; but what they do strikingly resemble is later alphabetic signs, to the point where the author, one of the foremost experts on Semitic epigraphy, really wanted the dating to be wrong.
Now the blog post doesn't go into much detail on these items but Schwartz's 20+ page 2021 paper (I had no trouble getting a free, legal copy) does (not always a lot more detail but also covers more possible alternatives). But, like the blog post says, the case Schwartz 2021 makes is still extremely cautious and he basically concludes that we just have to hope we can find more examples to confirm what kind of system they are from, and to increase the chance of deciphering them.
With 12 signals in total, it's very hard to show patterns that are in line with an alphabet. I don't think that with this sample size you can make a very strong claim that the chance that this is an alphabet is higher than the chance is that these symbol serve any other kind of purpose (including being a non-language). The main claim seems to be that repetition (what kind? I'm a quite disappointed the blog post has no transcritions, considering it's just 12 symbols we're talking about!) makes the chance that this is an alphabet higher. The rest of the claims (it doesn't resemble cuneiform, doesn't seem to be derived from hieroglyphs and doesn't seem related to any other script) are meaningless. The resemblence for later Canaanite alphabetic signs is interesting, and could probably be more convincing if we had a larger sample size.
So in the end, if we are convinced by these claims, we're basically saying something like "We have at most 1% confidence for every other theory, but we've got 2% confidence that this is an independent development of the alphabet that may have inspired the Canaanite alphabet we've seen 500 later". Higher confidence that is still far below the threshold doesn't cut it.
Now, I'm pretty sure the original article did not put the theory in these terms, but the headline is somewhat sensationalist, and the way it was picked up in newspapers is even worse, for instance:
Scientific American: World's Oldest Alphabet Found on an Ancient Clay Gift Tag
Stopping the press from misreporting science is a bit like trying to stop space rockets in midair with your bare hands, but even "Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city". The popular understanding of the word evidence is assumed to be "hard" evidence by default, not a weak evidence that bumps up the probability of a certain theory a little bit more.
I'll actually be quite excited if this turns out to be truly an alphabet encoding a Semitic language (it opens a lot of interesting questions and possibilities), but I'm not holding my breath for it.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I'll escort myself out now...
It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
If you can't translate it, how do they know it's alphabetic?
Customer: *checks cylinder*, hey, this isn't CHON, it's C𓅓ON!
Thousands of years later (with few cultural diffusion barriers) billions of people do not use alphabets. So there is probably something missing from this picture.
E.g., the large Chinese society is notoriously competitive and you would think that if the use of alphabet is an obvious enabler it would have been adopted by some segment?
Maybe there is a tradeof in a phonetic system: if the spoken language cannot be properly captured it negates the combinatorial benefits of an alphabet.
'Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of “super-hard languages” includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.' (Arabic linguist)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoqDR0Hd9f0&t=3645s