The inscribed Umm el-Marra cylinders of northwestern Syria, circa 2400 BC, 500 years before alphabetic writing was derived in Sinai from Egyptian hieratic phonetic writing.
So we are in fact talking a non proto-Sinaitic script?
One that presumably did not succeed, and was superseded by proto-Sinaitic?
Or perhaps influenced / led to proto-Sinaitic?
The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script, taking into account that they say that it does not resemble other known scripts.
Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of distinct syllables, like Japanese, so there is an overlap in the number of distinct symbols between alphabetic scripts for languages with a great number of phonemes and syllabic scripts for languages with a small number of syllables.
However, in this case it appears that the total amount of recovered text is quite small, so it would contain a small number of distinct symbols even if the original writing system had a greater number of distinct symbols, which did not happen to be recorded here.
Because the small total number of distinct symbols may be an accident in this case, it would not be enough to prove that this is an alphabetic script.
One should not forget that already since its origin, millennia before this, the Egyptian writing system had contained as a subset a set of symbols equivalent with the later Semitic alphabets, i.e. where each symbol was used for a single consonant.
However the Egyptian writing system has never used its alphabetic subset alone (except sometimes for transcribing foreign names), but together with many other symbols used for writing multiple consonants.
The invention of the Semitic alphabets did not add anything new, but it greatly simplified the Egyptian writing system by deleting all symbols used for multiple consonants and using exclusively the small number of symbols denoting a single consonant.
Because the alphabetic script has been invented by trying to apply the principles of the Egyptian writing to a non-Egyptian language, it could have been inspired by an already existing practice of using the alphabetic subset of the Egyptian writing for the transcription of foreign words.
All the many writing systems that have been invented independently of the Egyptian writing have used symbols denoting either syllables or words. Only the Egyptian writing had the peculiar characteristic of denoting only the consonants of the speech, independently of the vowels, which is what has enabled the development of alphabetic writing systems from it.
Wait, you're the same person that made the super insightful comment about the origins of life and RNA yesterday...
I'm honestly amazed at how you know so much about everything
>> I try to keep that in mind when I’m excavating today; scholars of the future are counting on us to leave the best documentation we can.
The answer is to stop digging. It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil, without destroying all that evidence that future generations might be able to use. Of course that means disrupting the dig-to-museum/auction/television pipeline that funds the field.
Who knows what will happen in Syria in the next decades. We need to document as much as we can, while we can.
> It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil
Who understands that? It's very interesting. Is there somewhere in archaeology where it's discussed? Is there a paper or article? It might be interesting for HN's front page.
I hope we will get much more research like this, now when Syria is liberated and has Democratic governors!
Its friendly governors but not yet proven to be democratic.
As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)
This is a modern distinction.
Until recently the term "alphabet" was used for any writing system where the symbols correspond approximately with phonemes, regardless whether both consonants and vowels are written as in all alphabets derived from or inspired by the Greek alphabet, or only the consonants are written, like in other writing systems derived from the old Semitic alphabet, without passing through the Greek alphabet.
Then the term "abjad" has been created, and also the term "abugida" (for alphabets where the base symbols are for consonants and the vowels are added as diacritic marks around the consonants), and the sense of "alphabet" has been restricted, in order to distinguish these 3 kinds of alphabets, but "alphabet" in the older wider sense can still be encountered frequently, either in the older literature or in informal speech, so one should be able to recognize both the stricter and the wider meanings.
In TFA, "alphabet" is used in the old wider sense. Moreover, it is not even used correctly in that sense, because they did not find a written "alphabet" like those used in teaching, but they have found a few written texts that are believed to have been written using an alphabetic script.
The oldest actual alphabets that have been found (which show the alphabetic order of the letters) are for the Ugaritic alphabet, which is older than the Phoenician alphabet, but much more recent than the oldest inscriptions that are believed to have been written with an alphabetic script.
> This is a modern distinction.
Well, the actual scripts were distinguished semantically all along, and "alphabet" is also a word newer than the scripts in question. We should probably just use the words that make most sense to modern english speakers rather than... whomever you're referring to. Or just use "phonetic script" or something.
The word "alphabet" has been used at least since the second century AD (e.g. by Tertullian), but it is composed from the names of the first 2 letters of the Phoenician alphabet, names that must be at least 3 millennia old.
Without additional conventions, "alphabet" would have been the appropriate name for any writing systems derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which include the majority of the writing systems based on alphabets, abjads or abugidas. The few other such writing systems, which have not passed through the Phoenician alphabet, are those derived from the Ancient South Arabian script, which for some reason had a different alphabetic order of the letters than the Northern Semitic alphabets, so it did not start with Alep and Bet.
The Hebrew alphabet does not include vowels.
By that standard, many alphabets, including the Phoenician and Arabic alphabets, aren't "real" alphabets.
Indeed, Arabic is an abjad.
shouldn't it be called a bjd?
I know you’re joking, but Arabic doesn’t write short vowels only. A as in “ah” is still written, so it would be “Abjd”
Yes, exactly. Linear A was the first alphabet, and greek gave "alphabet" its name.
I almost get the sense that people are interpreting abjad as "lesser-than" an alphabet. It's just a distinction, it's not a value judgement.
The article states, "symbols on the cylinders could be an early Semitic alphabet" and this is when they lost me. I guess we're just pushing propaganda now.
That’s common parlance in archeology for ancient languages in that region.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Semitic-speaking_peo...
And in linguistics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages