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It's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I assume that the author is asserting that the characters represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or syllables because those have been around much earlier. There's not much information though and I have no idea how they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized cylinders.

Well it helped me, I didn’t put two and two together.

Yes, however, I was still left wondering about the writing that existing from earlier; and was hoping the article would explain it.

I am still not fully clear actually -- Alphabet being a finite set of symbols, how did pre-alphabetic writing work?

Alphabets have symbols that represent sounds which are strung together to make words. Other types of writing might include symbols that represent words or phrases, with an example being like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters.

Also, in some, symbols represent syllables. It's significant because there are many more syllables than individual sounds.