Q&A for History of Mankind (35)

The discovery of the first alphabet rewrites the history of literacy. Plus questions about Tartessos, Alexander the Great, my Jeffrey Epstein movie & the history of farting

To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

This is the thirty-fifth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.

As usual, a quick reminder: all new paying subscribers get an electronic copy of my 2023 book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” (also available here) and also one of “Gods & Heroes,” an updated compilation of the first 43 posts in the History of Mankind series.

So, if you are paying subscriber and you didn’t get both already, please let me know. And one other thing for non-paying subscribers: please spare a thought for the Referral Page (which Substack calls Leaderboard). There you can see how people have been sharing A History of Mankind and earning rewards for their referrals: if you can send give friends who subscribe you get a three-month comp!

On top of this, there’s an exciting, newish discovery that we need to discuss: that of what appears to be the first alphabetic writing, etched onto finger-length clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University led by archaeologist Glenn Schwartz dated the writing to around 2400BC, preceding other known alphabetic scripts by about 500 years, according to a presentation of the findings they made in November:

Symbols on finger-sized clay objects discovered during dig at ancient city of Umm el-Marra could be earliest known alphabet.

This form of writing may have revolutionised language by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the social elite, scientists said.

Dr Schwartz and his team study how early urban areas in the Near East developed throughout Syria, and how smaller cities emerged in the area.

The team has been involved in a 16-year archaeological excavation at Tell Umm-el Marra, one of the first medium-sized ancient urban centres known to have popped up in western Syria.

At this site, archaeologists have previously uncovered tombs dating to the Early Bronze Age between 3500 and 2000BC.

One such well-preserved tomb was found to contain six skeletons, gold and silver jewellery, intact pottery, cookware, and a spearhead.

Experts finally crack mystery of skeleton made of bones from multiple people

Amid these artefacts, researchers found four lightly baked clay cylinders with what appeared to be alphabetic writing etched onto them.

Based on small perforations on the clay cylinders, scientists suspected it was likely tethered onto another object and acted as a kind of label.

“Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to,” Dr Schwartz explained.

“Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”

Researchers confirmed, using carbon dating techniques, that the tombs, the artefacts, and the writing were all from around 2400 BC. That’s a long time ago, indeed.

As I wrote in The World's First (Cuddly) State, most European and Middle Eastern alphabets descend from Egyptian hieroglyphs, an extremely complex and time-consuming method of communication that was designed to ensure that only Very Important People would have access to information:

Many ancient texts, not only Egyptian, were written in such a way that they could not be read easily by someone who did not already know them well. For centuries or indeed about three millennia, writing was not designed to provide a first-time introduction to a given textual tradition but were instead a reference point, a memory aide for oral recitation.

This is the reason why early alphabets and ideographic systems are so extremely complex. Complexity is the whole point: they worked the way a musical score does for a musician who already knows the piece, rather than like a book the reader has never encountered before. After years of long, difficult training, masters could sight-read texts, but the younger and uninitiated could do little more than standing in awe in front of the symbols of high-technology, power and religion, until they were initiated.

From the very beginning, hieroglyphs mixed ideographic and phonetic signs, in a manner similar to cuneiform writing in Sumer and Akkad and the writing later developed in China. The earliest hieroglyphs appear with royal names on tags and sealings to identify goods and materials of the state, and their widespread use was greatly promoted by the use of ink on the first kind of paper, papyrus, Egypt’s major gift to civilization.

The problem with this Egyptian approach to writing is that it wasn’t conducive to business record-keeping. The world’s first business-oriented people, the Phoenicians, for a long time vassals, suppliers and customers of the Egyptians, thus had to develop ways to simplify Egyptian hieroglyphs for their own use:

The first alphabet emerged in places in the enterprising Levant where the Egyptian writing system interacted with Mesopotamia’s, notably at the trade depot of Byblos; however, without the ink-and-papyrus technology, fully Egyptian, the enormous potential of alphabetic script for systematic theoretical knowledge, higher mathematics and literature would have been much harder to unlock.

At the same time, homophony and not meaning became the dominant driver: Phoenicians reused Egyptian characters depending on their sound, and then applied them to transcribe their own, fairly different language. Thus, very soon the Phoenician alphabet had little to do with Egyptian. Much the same happened in Egypt (with its own demotic script) and nearby Sumerian.

Syria borders Lebanon, so it’s not a surprise that archeologists found script on cylinders there. In fact, much of modern Syria is part of historical Phoenicia. The surprise is that this finding was made so far away from the coast where alphabet was supposedly devised, and that it corresponds to such an early age. Umm el-Marra is in northern Syria, 360 kilometers away from Byblos.

I suspect we’re going to hear more about this northern Syrian script and the implications of the finding.

Now for the questions from paying subscribers, on Tartessos, Alexander the Great, my Jeffrey Epstein movie & the history of farting: