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The oldest known alphabetic writing has been found etched onto finger-length clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria.. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in the US dated the writing ...
The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions are two rock inscriptions which appear to show some of the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date. [1] [2] Wadi el-Hol (where Wadi means valley in Arabic) is a valley on the Farshut Road, north-west of Luxor on the Qena Bend, situated on the west bank of the river Nile in Egypt. [3]
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the 14th century BC in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. [23] Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order.
More recently however, four cylinder seals dating to 2400 BC and found at the site of Umm el-Marra, in present-day Syria, are incised with what is potentially the earliest known alphabetic writings in the world. The discovery suggests that the alphabet emerged 500 years earlier than previously thought, and undermines leading ideas about how it ...
The final consonantal letter of the alphabet, s 2, has a disputed origin along with both "appended" glottals, but "The patent similarity of form between the Ugaritic symbol transliterated [s 2], and the s-character of the later Northwest Semitic script makes a common origin likely, but the reason for the addition of this sign to the Ugaritic ...
Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. Goldwasser, Orly, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Archived 2016-06-30 at the Wayback Machine Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010. Millard, A. R. (1986) "The Infancy of the Alphabet" World Archaeology. pp. 390–398.
It is believed that either the Dipylon inscription or the Nestor's Cup is the oldest known alphabetic Greek inscription. The Nestor Cup, which also bears a verse inscription, was found in an excavation at the ancient Greek colony of Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia, in Italy. It is thought to be of equal age with the Dipylon inscription or ...
The world's oldest known alphabet appears to have been developed by Canaanite turquoise miners in the Sinai desert around the mid-19th century BC. [54] Around 30 crude inscriptions have been found at a mountainous Egyptian mining site known as Serabit el-Khadem. This site was also home to a temple of Hathor, the "Mistress of turquoise".