Archaeologists might have discovered the world’s exciting gift tag.
The 4,500-year-old clay cylinder “gift tag” was found in a Syrian tomb in 2004, but didn’t gain notoriety until now. Researchers believe they have deciphered the etching on it as the earliest example of alphabet writing. The tag spells out “silanu,” which they think could be the name of someone in the tomb or someone who sent a gift to accompany the deceased in the afterlife. I guess they wanted to be “label” to put their name on it!
What makes the discovery even more fascinating is that the first alphabet writing system was previously thought to appear in 1900 B.C.E from the Semitic language of the Sinai Peninsula which repurposed hieroglyphic symbols as letters. The oldest writing systems were typically syllabic, like Sumerian cuneiform. But now the gift tag, originating from 2400 B.C.E., suggests an earlier origin for alphabet writing.
Linguistically, “logographic” means a writing system in which each symbol represents a meaningful unit, like a whole word, instead of a syllable. The best example is Chinese where each character represents a word, although they can be combined to create new words. Languages can be organized based on how logographic they are.
There are three types of writing systems:
- Logographic (logogrammatic): Each symbol or character represents a word or morpheme. In Chinese the single character 马 (mǎ) is for horse, and in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the symbol 𓃗 is for horse. With thousands of characters, you need a good memory for these languages!
- Syllabic (syllabary): Each symbol represents a syllable. For example in Cherokee, the word for horse is “soqui li” with three syllables, and it is written using three symbols: Ꮠ (so), Ꮘ (qui), and Ꮅ (li).
- Alphabetic (segmental): Each symbol represents an individual sound or phoneme. In Russian лошадь is the word for horse.
- An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent the consonants. In Arabic, the word for horse is حصان, which is made up of three letters: fa (ﻑ), ra (ﺭ), and sin (ﺱ).
- An abugida is an alphabet in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units. In Hindi the word horse for is घोड़ा.
- Fun Fact: The word alphabet comes from alpha and beta, the first two letters in the Greek alphabet.
Writing systems can include all three elements. Japanese has both logographic and syllabic aspects.
Logography creates a graded scale for languages based on how much they rely on logograms. Modern linguists use computer programs to measure how logographic a writing system is by analyzing the proportion between symbols that represent whole words and symbols that represent other units like sound.
Next time you write a gift tag, you may be giving future archeologists and researchers a glimpse of your language. Better make it neat!
Read more:
Cutts, E. (2024, November 22). World’s oldest alphabet found on an ancient clay gift tag. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-oldest-alphabet-discovered/.
Richard Sproat, Alexander Gutkin; The Taxonomy of Writing Systems: How to Measure How Logographic a System Is. Computational Linguistics 2021; 47 (3): 477–528. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00409.