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?