In 2010, archaeologist Glenn Schwartz quietly suggested that the history of writing needs, well, rewriting. More than a decade later, he still thinks he's on to something. If he's right, the world's ...

While excavating clay cylinders in Syria, archaeologists discovered a rare find: an early writing system. The script has given scholars the new challenge of reinvestigating the timeline of alphabetic ...

An archaeological breakthrough to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) reveals that the oldest known examples of alphabetic writing have been ...

Archaeologists say they have uncovered evidence of what may be the world's oldest known alphabet. The alphabetic writing system was identified on finger-length clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in ...

A recent archaeological discovery could overturn our understanding of the origins of alphabetic writing. Clay cylinders, dated to 2400 BCE, bear inscriptions that might represent the earliest traces ...

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. Credit: Glenn Schwartz / ...

SANTA CRUZ — While a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz history professor Elaine Sullivan unearthed ancient artifacts in Syria marked with an alphabetic script whose meaning ...

The earliest known example of alphabetic writing has been discovered etched onto small clay cylinders in an ancient Syrian tomb, which was excavated by researchers from Maryland’s Johns Hopkins ...

Most of the world’s languages are written alphabetically; in an alphabetic writing system the basic components represent sounds only without any reference to meaning. For example, the letter “b” in ...