For decades, it's been a common belief that the Ancient Egyptians were responsible for the very first alphabet. Now, a shocking finding challenges this assumption, pushing back the age of the ...

Symbols on finger-sized clay objects discovered during dig at ancient city of Umm el-Marra could be earliest known alphabet (Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University) This form of writing may have ...

Schwartz discovered the finger-sized cylinder, along with three others bearing similar etchings, in a tomb at Tell Umm el-Marra, an ancient city ... narrative of how the alphabet was introduced ...

Clay objects roughly the size of fingers were discovered during a dig at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra. The engraved symbols may be part of the earliest known alphabet. What appears to be ...

for example—these did not make use of an alphabet. Cuneiform, considered to be the oldest known writing system, was developed by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (an ancient region centered on ...

Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest known alphabetic writing in an ancient Syrian city ... "Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 ...

The earliest known example of alphabetic writing has been discovered etched onto small clay cylinders in an ancient Syrian tomb ... scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt ...

Researchers have discovered evidence of what they say is the world’s oldest alphabet, believed to have existed in the Middle East hundreds of years earlier than other ancient scripts.

It was previously thought that the alphabet originated in Egypt or its ... origins and their impact on early urban societies. The ancient city of Umm-el Marra in western Syria has been the focus ...

"Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE," Schwartz said. "But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting ...