Right. 4 clay cylinders inch-long, perforated, with geometric symbols on the outside, are not jewelry (otherwise found in the same tomb) but ... labels with a new form of writing because... they were found next to the pottery?
The article is brilliantly written to lead with the significance of such a find before providing evidence.
> I will convey my own perspective regarding these four inscribed clay cylinders: namely, the script is Early Alphabetic (based on the clear morphology of the letters), the language is arguably Semitic, and the date is early (based on the secure archaeological context and carbon 14 dates).
> My initial thought (because of the graphemic shapes of the signs on the cylinders and the clear similarity to Early Alphabetic letters) was that these cylinders might be intrusive
So, the major argument that they're writing is that they look very similar to other writing that we can read. Imagine that you can read Latin, but not Greek, and you're confronted with some inscriptions in Greek. Should you call them writing?
"乇乂ㄒ尺卂" looks like "EXTRA", but it's (meaninglessly-arranged) Chinese characters with a purely coincidental relationship to the Latin.
Did they find a bunch of these artifacts, with a variety of inscriptions? If so then sure, I buy it. If it's just the "CHON" fragment - that could well be coincidence.
ahmedfromtunis's comment was killed, presumably because he attributed it to Gemini, but it was correct on the facts. Here's the response I wrote to him:
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Count of symbol types is what you'd look at. You have a bunch of unknown symbols, so there's nothing else you can look at.
[*] Many Japanese syllables are spelled with digraphs ("sh", if the "h" appeared in a special combining form) or diacritics ("è", if è and e were completely distinct sounds, as they are in French), which lowers the memory burden. I've counted diacritics as creating new symbols and digraphs as not doing so.
It's common to think of alphabetic writing as all writing. I assume that the author is asserting that the characters represent individual phonemes as opposed to pictograms or syllables because those have been around much earlier. There's not much information though and I have no idea how they can make such a radical claim with 4 finger-sized cylinders.
It should also be noted that a difference is often made between alphabets in the strict sense, where consonants and also vowels are represented by distinct symbols, and alphabets in the wider sense, where this is not the case (vowels are not represented at all or occasionally by certain consonant symbols typically when clarification is necessary). A writing system where symbols denote larger units of speech is not called an alphabet, but a syllabary. If it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units, it is called a logographic script. There are of course all kinds of mixed forms ("I ♥ NY").
Technically, a syllabary only refers to writing systems where the symbol represents the specific consonant and vowel pair, such as Japanese's Hiragana. For example, in a syllabary, the syllables "ka" and "ki" are two different symbols.
If the vowels are optional or not present, e.g. there's one "k" symbol regardless of the vowel, it's an Abjad. The archetypal Abjad is the Hebrew writing system.
If the vowels are written by adding them to the consonant symbol (similar to diacritics), it's called an Abugida. One example of this is the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia.
I did not want to make it too technical, so "Abjad" falls under "alphabets in the wider sense" and "Abugida" under "mixed forms". My comment was based on the assumption that the article in question does not necessarily refer to an alphabet in the strict sense. To make this clear, I did not think it was necessary to go into too much detail.
There are many specialized terms for different types of writing system, but those distinctions are generally of very little interest unless you're compiling a table of different writing systems.
Generally you look at what concepts are embodied in the script, and at the form of the glyphs. So:
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to phonemes. ("Language is made of sounds.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to consonants and doesn't bother to represent vowels. ("Language is made of sounds, and some of them are more important than others.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to syllables. ("Language is made of things you can say.")
You might have a script in which the glyphs assigned to syllables are composed of recognizable and conceptually distinct parts, but those parts have no independent representation. (Compare the glyphs ሀ ለ ሐ with the related glyphs ሄ ሌ ሔ.) ("Language is made of things you can say, but there are patterns.")
You might have a script that assigns glyphs to words, though in almost all cases you don't. The label "logographic script", applied to a script the labeler doesn't know well, is infinitely more popular than the concept "logographic script". I don't think any script has ever existed meeting the criterion of "it does not represent phonetic, but semantic units". But there are some, and used to be more, that leaned more or less strongly in that direction.
Wow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself.
It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
How do they know when the writing is pictographic (an idea expressed as an image, like a big predator showing teeth), or syllabic (an image of a bestial grunt, basically, like 'ugh' or 'caw' or what not) or alphabetic (the breakdown of syllabic utterances into, at first, the hard consantants and the vowels)?
Basically, the number of symbols and the repeating patterns. But it seems that in this particular case, they also relied on the shapes of the "letters" to conclude the alphabetic nature of the script.
This happens every time there’s a discussion involving Syria (and already kind of is), so I’ll just get in front of it: please don’t normalize Assad. He is a horrible, genocidal dictator. No amount of whataboutism will change that.
It is really rich when a non-Syrian tries to educate people on how the revolution in Syria is fake and Assad didn’t actually kill half a million (mostly Sunni Arab) Syrian men, women, and children. Including with chemical weapons. He also caused deliberate demographic change. It’s really grim.
The descendants of the inventors of alphabet, agriculture, and urban civilisation are right now in a charnel house. Do not kick them while they are down.
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