A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
universityofcalifornia.edu151 points by diodorus a year ago
151 points by diodorus a year ago
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One that presumably did not succeed, and was superseded by proto-Sinaitic?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
>the same person that made the super insightful comment about the origins of life and RNA yesterday...
Astute observation.
That's some worthwhile reading.
I would say that some people can make use of natural intelligence better than others can do with the artificial stuff.
Yes, there's been a lot of protocell research. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42726539
> 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.
Hangul was developed independently of Egyptian script and is purely alphabetic.
Aren’t Hangul consonants joined with vowels to create syllabic blocks? Is that still an alphabet? It seems different to the distinct characters for letters and vowels that the Latin alphabet, for example, has.
> there are languages with a relatively small number of distinct syllables, like Japanese
Japanese has around 50 syllabic symbols, depending on how you count - include both sets of kana? include more archaic kana? etc
What would be a more typical number of syllabic symbols? I tried googling it to get an idea, but couldn't find much useful information. I guess Arabic has 28?
I think they meant syllables specifically, not syllabic symbols. Meanings syllabic symbols might get confused for an alphabet if the language has a sufficiently small set of syllables. See https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909
Yeah, was aware of that possibility; I guess I should have made a point about the disctinction between symbols vs "possible sound combinations" (my words). And even "possible sound combinations" can be further limited to "actually used sound combinations" as mentioned in the answer on that SO link.
So, in terms of "possible sound combinations" I think Japanese would likely be on the lower side given that the number of sounds are also pretty low. Alright, thank you for that reply; the point in the original post I replied to makes more sense to me now.
> The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script
Yes. I noticed this too, upon reading. Symbols, yes. Alphabet rather than proto-writing? that's a claim!
I almost took an introductory course on archeology with Glenn Schwartz, many years ago, but dropped it after the first class. I remember having very different emotional responses to faculty members as a student. Schwartz struck me as elegant, diffident, blue-blooded, and completely disinterested in teaching a bunch of young morons who were just taking the course as a distribution requirement. I'm glad to see that he and his former students are an influential force in this area of study.
I always say a professor has (at least) 3 personalities, each of which do not need be similar to one another
- Teacher
- Advisor
- Faculty
>> 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.
Here is something regarding a 3d scan of a building destroyed by Isis. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/27/isis-palmyra-...
> 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.
It is happening today. Chambers inside Egypt's great pyramid were detected in 2016 using muon imaging. It was a slow process but radically less damaging than the alternatives such as drilling test holes. More commonly, ground penetrating radar is regularly used to avoid digging test or exploratory trenches across sites. As resolution increases, fewer and fewer trenches need be dug. Scans are often used years prior to digging as a non-invasive way to confirm the existance of structures in aid of grant proposals. At some point, the scans will be the entire dig.
I've heard of that application, but will it detect faint writing, which experts weren't intially sure was writing, on a 4 cm long piece of rock? I don't that's happening any time soon.
They said that about x-rays. Now we have cat scan machines.
Who said what about x-rays? And what is your argument? Because x-ray technology developed to CT scanning, then all technology will develop infinitely?
I have heard old time time tv episodes explain that. They were asked why sto digging a site and that was the answer. Archeology seems to be self aware as a discipline. The modern participants have been ham strung by earlier generations.
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.
How democratic a regime is can only be measured in hindsight unfortunately
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In the LOTR, Eru Ilúvatar created the world with a specific hierarchy.
In the Abrahamic religions everything happens for a reason
In Buddhism suffering is enlightenment or something like that about some path
In the world of the rich kids Leibniz and Darwin it be what it be
So if all history is written by a few it is the will of the universe fighting that would be like fighting the very nature of reality itself.
This is the way. If you are a dreamer sometimes you may see glimpses of a different reality but that's all they are glimpses that maybe eons from now may become reality
There's a certain poetry to the parent comment, but I don't understand what it's meant to convey.
Hierarchy, eugenics, slavery, inequality are all part of the fabric of our reality
History in this reality will always be written by the people at the top of the hierarchy i.e the last two empires to rule the world
Sometimes we dream and see glimpses of a world without slavery, inequality or hierarchy but it is a dream nothing more
Lol shoulda just said that
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.
> 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
You're doing a lot of equivocating between identity and ancestry. (e.g. saying that "alphabet" is composed of the names of two Phoenician letters rather than two Greek ones.)
In that framework, can we actually say that Ugaritic script is older than Phoenician script? My impression was that all of our knowledge of Ugaritic arises by coincidence, just that we happened to excavate a tell that turned out to keep records in what is as far as we know a script unique to it. Do we have reason to believe that someone wasn't using a proto-Phoenician script at the same time and we just haven't excavated them?
And we live in the modern world, so we should use the modern definitions?
For reference, "abjad" was introduced in 1990, so it's 35 years old. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to start using 35 year old terms to accurately describe academic subjects.
Academic terminology tends to be inconsistent, vary from person to person, and evolve from year to year. The usual expectation is that you should define the terms you use if their exact meaning is important. Otherwise people will misinterpret them.
"Abjad" seems to be a more specific term than "alphabet". Sometimes it is used as a subcategory of "alphabet" (as in "abjad alphabet") and sometimes the terms are mutually exclusive.
> 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.
While the greek letter names are derived from phoenician (e.g. aleph/alef/alep and bet), my understanding is that the term was first coined in reference to the greek script (e.g. alpha + bet-). It does, however, seem increasingly silly to look to etymology to argue for why we should use the terms as I did when actual evidence as to the origin seems extremely sketchy at best and may not be relevant to our current needs.
I just think it's useful to distinguish consonantal scripts from those with full vowel inclusion. Why not use alphabet/abjad for this? There's already a broad understanding of this meaning; why not lean into it?
I'll also admit this gets more complicated when I see people referring to an "abjad alphabet", but this leaves us with no way to describe an alphabet with consonants and vowels as opposed to a consonantal one.
Funny that the word abugida is itself taken from the Amharic word for the Northern Semitic letter ordering—as you say, the traditional order for ፊደል goes ሀለሐመ…
By that standard, many alphabets, including the Phoenician and Arabic alphabets, aren't "real" alphabets.
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.
It's a subclass, not a separate category. Some alphabets don't write vowels.
How do you refer just to the sort of alphabets that do have vowels and not abjads?
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”
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.
Semitic is the scientific term for a family of languages, like Indo-European or Uralic. Today, the most important languages of this group are Arabic and Hebrew, but in the past many other languages of this group have been very important, e.g. Aramaic and Akkadian.
It is very weird that in the phrase "anti-Semitic" most people understand Semitic to refer to Israelis, while today most of the Semites are Arabs.
The term "Semitic" is not at all appropriate as a linguistic term, but nobody has succeeded to find any acceptable replacement.
In the Bible, the populations were divided in 3 groups, sons of Japheth (hence the American word "Caucasian", because Japheth is a term for Caucasus), sons of Shem and sons of Ham. From Shem and Ham, the linguistic terms "Semitic" and "Hamitic" have been derived.
However the use of these words for classifying languages has been based on a misunderstanding of the Bible. In that classification of the populations from the Bible, the division did not have anything to do with their descendance from ancestors speaking a common language, but it was completely determined by the political dependence of the territories by the time when the Genesis was composed.
The so-called sons of Ham where those who lived in territories dominated by Egypt ("Ham" is related to the native name of Egypt; Egypt is a Greek word), while the so-called sons of Shem were those who lived in territories dominated by Babylon or Assyria ("Shem" may be related to "Sumer").
As one of the examples that demonstrate that the Genesis classification was political, not linguistic, the Phoenicians were sons of Ham, not sons of Shem, like the Arabs and Hebrews, despite the fact that the Phoenician language was a Semitic language almost identical to Hebrew (the main difference between Phoenicians and Hebrews was in religion). The Phoenicians were sons of Ham, because at that time most Phoenician cities accepted the suzerainty of Egypt, even if they had a certain autonomy.
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
It's not specialized at all; "Semitic" is the only word for this concept used in English.
In German they still talk about Hamito-Semitic languages, but we call those Afroasiatic now.