I'm curious how they arrived at the conclusion it's an alphabet without deciphering it.
Normally researcher will make a statistical distribution and compared it with the existing deciphered alphabets for example the most popular is the yet to be deciphered Indus script against the popular Egyption script or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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:
Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing: it's four cylinders with some markings on them, supposedly in an unknown language (convenient!), that appears to have had zero influence on and zero influence from its surrounding region. For the two claimants to the oldest alphabets — the Indus script [1], and the Proto-Sinaitic script [2] — there is ample evidence of broad usage and influence from existing cultures: the Proto-Sinaitic script developed as simplified hieroglyphics used to communicate with Canaanite slaves [3] in Egypt and was the origin of (probably) all modern alphabetic systems, and the Indus script developed from earlier potter's marks over hundreds of years and has nearly a thousand years of archeological evidence, although there is some debate as whether it qualifies as an alphabet. This appears unrelated to any existing writing system in the region, and — if it was an alphabet — appears to have had no subsequent influence on any other writing system ever made. If archeologists are suspicious of even the Indus script, how on earth do these qualify?
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
> 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?
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.
The skeptics also provided similar arguments as yours against the idea of Egyption hieroglyphics as syllabic/alphabets until they found the venerable Rosetta Stone, and the rest is history. We just need another Rosetta Stone but for Indus script.
This does not make GP incorrect though. It just means we really cannot know for sure how the writing system works until we have enough information to decipher the inscriptions.
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.
> Personally I'm not convinced that it's alphabetic writing
What is their evidence and argument for it?
The tldr is that they don't know it's alphabetic for sure (see below quote). The main scholar (Glenn Schwartz) who co-oversaw the '94-'10 excavation isn't an expert in writing. He put it out there around 2010 and said "maybe it's alphabetic, idk" and there was not much followup from the community. So he consulted with some writing experts who helped him with the 2021 paper where he goes over the evidence for different possibilities and suggests that the strongest argument is for alphabetic. The dating seems to be on firmer ground but the error bands on this and Wadi el-Hol can probably knock a century or two off the "500 years".
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.
I admit I didn't have time to read this blog post deeply, but it doesn't sound very convincing. It doesn't bring any EVIDENCE that this is an alphabet it just cites other cases of possible alphabets in Mesopotamia and the near East [1].
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?
> it doesn't sound very convincing
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.
> Egypt didn't have these clay cigars
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I'll escort myself out now...
How is it better than the alternative "we have a set of symbol and we don't know what it means"? I really think there is a merit in saying "with this sample size, every theory we put out has low confidence level".
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.
ahmedfromtunis's comment was killed, presumably because he attributed it to Gemini, but it was correct on the facts. Here's the response I wrote to him:
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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.
How do you get 71 hiraganas? By counting the dakuten versions and smaller versions separately?
Right. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because... they were found next to the pottery?
The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
The article is well cited. They handily beat out newspapers by providing links to earlier blog posts on the research.
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?
> Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
Not sure if this is good example since we know that Greek alphabet really is writing.
"乇乂ㄒ尺卂" looks like "EXTRA", but it's (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely coincidental relationship to the Latin.
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.
Depends; your example (乇乂ㄒ尺卂) would be a truly stupendous coincidence if it were the only extant example of something and the Chinese characters just happened to be arranged in that way, but would be much weaker evidence if you had gone mining through thousands of characters and cherry-picked one five-character string that happened to match something. It would be an even bigger coincidence if those five characters, in sequence, were found, by themselves, on a document created in an English-speaking or Latin-alphabet-writing region.
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.
Is it worth inquiring whether people who acquired PhDs and have spent lifetimes studying this subject, and (I think) years studying these particular objects, would overlook and be fooled by the most obvious issue?