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.

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 ...

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 ...

The team has been involved in a 16-year archaeological excavation at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-sized ancient urban ... scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around ...

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 ...

"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 ...

A sequence of letters belonging to an ancient alphabet has been discovered in a most unusual way — by someone scrolling through social media. The inscription, on a slate slab unearthed in Spain ...

In a 2017 study in the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers looked at the ancient DNA of five Canaanites who lived between 3,650 and 3,750 years ago and who were buried in Sidon, an ...