While early writing systems emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt over 5,000 years ago, they used symbols rather than a bona fide alphabet, which appeared significantly later, around 1800 BCE.

Alphabetic language, or written language made of individual letters, is a newer invention, but now, archaeologists believe they have discovered the “oldest known alphabet” ever found.

The Canannites invented the first alphabet about 3,800 years ago. The letters, instead of hieroglyphics like those used in Egypt, became the basis for written Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Archaeologists have uncovered the oldest known alphabetic writing in an ancient Syrian city, suggesting alphabets may be around 500 years older than previously thought. Johns Hopkins University ...

Funded by the National Science Foundation, University at Buffalo researchers are taking a major step toward boosting online access to documents written in ancient Sanskrit, modern Hindi and dozens of ...

An engraving on an ancient lice comb is potentially the oldest known sentence written using an alphabet. The ivory comb bears a sentence in an early Canaanite script, estimated to date back almost ...

To say that mystery glyphs look like “early alphabetic letters” is to say that they look like crude versions of hieroglyphs 24 April, p 15. Finding such hieroglyphs in Syria 850 years before ...