The early Greek alphabet was painted on the body of an Attic black-figure cup. Credit: flickr / Dan Diffendale CC BY-SA 2.0 ...

In 2004, while she was still a meticulous young graduate student, Elaine Sullivan made a discovery that would deepen the history of human writing. Using trowels and brushes to remove ancient soil at ...

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The earliest known example of alphabetic writing has been discovered etched onto small clay cylinders in an ancient Syrian tomb, which was excavated by researchers from Maryland’s Johns Hopkins ...

Clay objects roughly the size of fingers were discovered during a dig at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra. The engraved symbols may be part of the earliest known alphabet. What appears to be evidence ...

From the depths of ancient mines came a revolutionary idea: a simple set of symbols that anyone could learn — the birth of the alphabet, and the democratization of knowledge.