
© Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins UniversityClay 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 evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.
The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE,
precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations.
"Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated," said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. "And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now."
Schwartz will share details of his discovery on Thursday, Nov. 21, at the
American Society of Overseas Research's Annual Meeting.
A Near Eastern archaeologist, Schwartz studies how early urban areas developed throughout Syria and how smaller cities emerged in the region. With colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, he co-directed a 16-year-long archaeological dig at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-sized urban centers that popped up in western Syria.
Comment: Over the many centuries of health herbals and medicinals, all sold by both the benevolent and the malevolent snake oil salesman, a new medical era was entered. In the year 1907, the biggest posers and snakes to crawl out of the medical grass, were the Rockefellers and their fixer, Simon Flexner, MD. Back then, traditional medicine was usurped as new medical colleges, institutions and manufacture's were built-up and cemented. Thus, today they have become the 'official' medical establishment that we all live with, along with their government and media supporters.
To be fair, it must be noted that many in the establishment uphold their conscious Hippocratic oath, while carrying out great acts of medical skill and healing, yet their are plenty of those that cause only human wreckage by their hands (graduated at the bottom of the class, or Without Conscience, comes to mind). For the latter, their established work has become one of abject greed, control and wealth, which only adds emphasis to the word parasitical. All of that has become so much worse following the advent of decades of degraded toxic food, poison adjunct in vaccines, and now tinkering with human genetics - with injected DNA/mRNA. Their latest coup de grâce, has now born out of injection of nanobots into human bodies. Who knows what will happen next.
F. William Engdahl and others have had a look at history:
Toxicology vs Virology: Rockefeller Institute and the Criminal Polio Fraud Did psychopath Rockefeller create the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918?