In late November, speaking at an academic conference in Boston, veteran archaeologist Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University made a startling claim: Four tiny clay cylinder-shaped seals, which had been excavated 20 years ago from an intact Bronze Age tomb in Syria, were engraved with what he asserted was the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing — albeit as yet undeciphered.
His presentation, made on November 21 at a meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research, made waves in academia and was extensively reported by mainstream media worldwide. Schwartz most recently floated his alphabet hypothesis in 2021 in an Italian journal, but, like his previous attempts to publicize it, didn’t garner much attention.
If substantiated, the renewed claim would push back the development of a letters-based writing system by some 500 years, to around 2300 BCE. Previously, scholarly consensus has held that a writing system based on symbols corresponding to spoken sounds was first developed around 1800-1900 BCE in Egypt and the Sinai and spread from there.
Numerous experts have expressed support, sometimes tentatively, for Schwartz and his theory. Schwartz declined an interview with The Times of Israel and would not comment further about his theories. However, a former student was willing to weigh in.
“The writing on these cylinder seals seems to me to be alphabetic writing, and I don’t really have any doubt about that,” wrote Prof. Christopher Rollston, department chair and professor of Biblical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, in an email exchange.
The cylinders are “stunning written artifacts, and they are indeed particularly important,” he added.
Previous to Schwartz’s discovery, “we had no alphabetic writing from the 3rd millennium BCE,” Rollston said, so “if these inscribed cylinder seals from Umm el-Marra do indeed date as early as Dr. Glenn Schwartz contends, then these would be the world’s earliest alphabetic inscriptions.”
The find, unexpected
The clay cylinders were uncovered in 2004 in Umm el-Marra, an ancient site in Syria east of Aleppo, as part of what was then an ongoing joint archaeological expedition by Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam.
Umm el-Marra in the early Bronze Age was a developing urban center, one of the oldest cities in the ancient Levant, and is thought by some to be Tuba, a city in the region mentioned in ancient Egyptian records. The site is a tel, a mound with multiple layers of habitation built on top of each other over time.
Archaeologists have discovered numerous important finds at Umm el-Marra, including a ritual burial site of more than two dozen equids, giving researchers insight into how horses and donkeys were used there at the time.
The cylinders, estimated to be around 4,400 years old, were part of a spectacular discovery of a group of undisturbed, elite tombs found in a larger mortuary complex.
According to a November Johns Hopkins press release on the cylinders, “One of the best-preserved tombs contained six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and intact pottery vessels. Next to the pottery, the researchers found four lightly baked clay cylinders with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on them.”
The cylinders were perforated, leading the researchers to speculate that they could be attached to an object and act as a label, detailing the contents, origin or owner.
Schwartz, who is credited with discovering the cylinders, is Archaeology Program director and Whiting professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University. His 2024 book, “Animals, Ancestors, and Ritual in Early Bronze Age Syria: An Elite Mortuary Complex from Umm el-Marra,” is a final report of the years of excavations at Umm el-Marra.
He said in November that the cylinders were a “new discovery that shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”
However, a 2021 release about the cylinders on the Johns Hopkins website notes that Schwartz had addressed the nature of the cylinders in previous papers and presentations from 2019 and 2021, and as far back as 2006 and 2010 had “quietly suggested” that the cylinders could alter what is known about the history of the development of writing.
Schwartz, who as an archaeologist is a specialist in the development of urban centers and not on ancient writing systems, said in the 2021 release that the reaction to his theory about the cylinders was “muted” among academics because it greatly contradicted previously accepted ideas, so “they can’t believe it.”
“Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE. But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought,” Schwartz said then.
So why did the latest report receive such publicity?
The gauntlet
George Washington University’s Rollston studied with Schwartz as a graduate student and is one of the academics in the field who have been aware of the existence of the cylinders for some time. He suggested to The Times of Israel that another scholar, Dr. Madadh Richey of Brandeis University, highlighted the importance of the Umm el-Marra cylinders in a 2023 paper, and this seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In that paper, “Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Origins of the Alphabet,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Maarav (University of Chicago Press), Richey argued that the Umm el-Marra cylinders, together with other discoveries in the Levant, including what seem to be early alphabetic symbols inscribed on several Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets dating from the 18th-16th centuries CE, suggested “a northern Levantine context for the Early Alphabet’s initial adaptation from Egyptian hieroglyphs and its earliest usage.”
Richey, who did not reply to a Times of Israel query on the issue, noted in her paper that Schwartz has publicized information about the cylinders since 2010, but the findings did not gain traction in the field, suggesting “a level of scholarly discomfort with what appears to be field-changing data.”
As Rollston characterizes it, Richey “basically threw down the gauntlet to Glenn Schwartz and encouraged him to draw more attention to these finds, because of their importance.” This led to Schwartz’s November presentation, which seemed to finally grab the world’s attention.
What the cylinders mean
Writing is “a technology,” Rollston told The Times of Israel, and therefore “these cylinder seals from Umm el-Marra are very useful in helping us to understand, even better, the ancient technology of writing in the ancient Middle Eastern world.”
To understand the import of the cylinders and their inscriptions, it’s important to understand the “broader context,” Rollston stressed.
Writing began “during the late 4th millennium BCE, around 3200 BCE,” he said, noting that there were two early writing systems: one in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, known as cuneiform, that originated to write down the Sumerian language, and one in ancient Egypt, the well-known hieroglyphic script.
Within these non-alphabetic writing systems, one symbol could signify a whole word, a syllable or a connecting word such as an adjective and therefore these systems had hundreds of symbols, “and for this reason, they are particularly complicated,” Rollston said.
Alphabetic writing systems are “very different” from non-alphabetic writing systems and much more streamlined and flexible, as “most alphabets consist of twenty or thirty letters,” he said.
“The shapes of the letters in the earliest alphabet (which we often call ‘Early Alphabetic’ or ‘Canaanite’ or ‘Proto-Sinaitic’) hail from Egyptian models… the inventors of the earliest alphabet were familiar with Egyptian writing, and those inventors modeled the shapes of the letters of the alphabet” on an Egyptian base, he explained.
It is hard to consider the engravings on the Umm al-Marra cylinders as “anything but alphabetic writing since the morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals often parallels reasonably well that of the existing corpus of Early Alphabetic writing,” Rollston said.
One of the symbols is even a “very nice ayin [a letter in Semitic languages], which has a dot in the center which represents the pupil of the eye,” he noted.
The fact that the cylinders were discovered in situ by respected experts in the field in “a secure archaeological context” where accurate dating was possible gives greater weight to the discovery, Rollston said.
The Umm el-Marra cylinders are likely “written in a dialect of ancient Semitic” and could be “a fledgling attempt in early alphabetic writing,” he said, but stressed that “to determine with absolute certainty that these are alphabetic letters on the cylinder seals, we would really want to have more inscriptions, preferably longer texts.”
Further insights
In his November presentation on the cylinders, Schwartz contended that the symbols do not correspond to any known language but, by comparing them to characters used in ancient Semitic languages, could perhaps represent sounds that corresponded to the letters A, I, K, L, N, S and Y, according to a Nature article that covered details of the presentation.
The ancient cylinders are of uniform shape, each being about one centimeter thick and almost five centimeters long, with small holes on either end.
The symbols “appear 11 times in total on the cylinders and some are repeated, evidence that they might be part of an alphabet. Two of the four cylinders seem to have the same sequence, finishing with the same symbol…. The longer the sequence of symbols, the more likely it is to represent writing,” Schwartz said in his presentation.
He also suggested that, because two of the symbols resemble hieroglyphs, the creators of the cylinders “might have had direct contact with Egyptian hieroglyphs through trade,” according to the article.
This idea is supported by Richey in 2023, who wrote, “The northern Levant was under regular Egyptian influence throughout this period and therefore serves as a plausible, even likely, locus of the type of cross-cultural interaction that led to the alphabetic adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphs.”
A mystery, unsolved
Although a growing number of scholars worldwide seem to be warming to Schwartz’s idea that the inscriptions on the cylinders are indeed a breakthrough in our understanding of how and when alphabetic writing developed, many questions remain.
As Rollston noted, more examples of the same writing system are necessary for further research, but if the Umm el-Marra writing was only a local phenomenon, there is little chance of further research due to political conditions in the area.
The joint John Hopkins/University of Amsterdam research project, which ran from 1994 to 2010, ended some time ago. There have been reports of extensive looting and destruction of Syrian antiquities sites as a result of the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011 and concluded with the recent, lightning-quick ouster of ruler Bashar al-Assad by Syrian rebel groups, which has led to further fears about the status of Syria’s rich archaeological and historical heritage.
The new, post-revolution Syrian government is in its early stages, but perhaps it will display greater openness to the Umm al-Marra findings than the old regime: A notice in late November from the old Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, whose website is currently offline, flatly disagreed with Schwartz and “denied that the discovery circulated by local and international media in the Tell Umm al-Marra area east of Aleppo is an ‘alphabet,’” according to a report in the state-owned Syria Times website, which is also currently offline.
“This discovery is merely a hypothesis published by an archaeologist who worked with an American mission at the aforementioned site in his book in 2010, and was recently re-circulated without the existence of recent excavations at the aforementioned site,” the statement said, implying that Schwartz’s claims about the cylinders were old news that was presented without renewed research at the site — something that is currently impossible.
