alt Hacker NewsA UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
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The inscribed Umm el-Marra cylinders of northwestern Syria, circa 2400 BC, 500 years before alphabetic writing was derived in Sinai from Egyptian hieratic phonetic writing.
I hope we will get much more research like this, now when Syria is liberated and has Democratic governors!
>> I try to keep that in mind when I’m excavating today; scholars of the future are counting on us to leave the best documentation we can.
The answer is to stop digging. It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil, without destroying all that evidence that future generations might be able to use. Of course that means disrupting the dig-to-museum/auction/television pipeline that funds the field.
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As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)
The article states, "symbols on the cylinders could be an early Semitic alphabet" and this is when they lost me. I guess we're just pushing propaganda now.
I almost took an introductory course on archeology with Glenn Schwartz, many years ago, but dropped it after the first class. I remember having very different emotional responses to faculty members as a student. Schwartz struck me as elegant, diffident, blue-blooded, and completely disinterested in teaching a bunch of young morons who were just taking the course as a distribution requirement. I'm glad to see that he and his former students are an influential force in this area of study.