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 an Early Bronze Age burial site in Umm el-Marra, Western Syria — 35 miles from modern-day Aleppo — Sullivan unearthed a pivotal clue: four small clay cylinders inscribed with mysterious symbols.
Now a UC Santa Cruz history professor and renowned Egyptologist, Sullivan recalls her excitement that season when she first spotted the first artifact. “I was running all of the materials through a sieve by hand in order to make sure that we captured any artifacts, no matter how small,” Sullivan says.
At first, the drably colored object nearly escaped her attention.
“When I picked the first cylinder up, I thought it was merely a compacted piece of surface dirt,” Sullivan said. “Only after brushing it off did I realize it was an artifact.”
She quickly called over her advisor, Glenn Schwartz, an archaeologist at Johns Hopkins University, who examined the object with care. But he hesitated to draw any immediate conclusions because early languages are not his primary subject of research.
But Schwartz, over time, began to explore the possibility that the symbols on the cylinders could be an early Semitic alphabet dating to the Bronze Age.
After the discovery of the first artifact, the team continued to dig, uncovering the three additional cylinders, each about two inches long and inscribed with similar markings.
The discovery was thrilling but mysterious. “Anytime you're working in an ancient context and you find something with writing on it, it’s very exciting,” Sullivan explains.
However, when the team cleaned the cylinders, they realized the symbols did not belong to any known script like Egyptian hieroglyphs or a recognizable Near Eastern language.
At the time, the team hoped the symbols might reveal details about the people buried in the tomb, known as Tomb 4.
The burial site contained other artifacts like pottery, metal vessels, and jewelry, but the cylinders stood out. Despite initial disappointment that the inscriptions didn’t provide immediate answers, their significance has grown clearer over time.
“The cylinders are remarkable because they force us to rethink where, when, and how the alphabet was invented, and not just because they date at least 500 years earlier than the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing previously identified,” Schwartz said. “Further, they were found in northern Syria, rather than Egypt and the southern Levant, where the earliest known examples had previously been identified.”
“When Elaine discovered the cylinders, she had been working meticulously, exposing and documenting the objects on the floor of the tomb,” Schwartz continued.”If she hadn't been so careful and so observant, these little clay objects - of the same color and consistency as the clay floor of the tomb - could easily have been overlooked.”
“I suspect that's why archaeologists haven't found similar objects elsewhere,” Schwartz said. “Ordinary excavations are faster paced and don't allow for such careful consideration of every little morsel of dirt turned up.”
History professor and renowned Egyptologist Elaine Sullivan.
In 2021, Schwartz and his colleagues used radiocarbon dating to determine that the tomb burials date to around 2400 BCE, placing the cylinders from Tomb 4 five centuries earlier than any previously known alphabetic inscriptions.
Schwartz presented these findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Researchers this fall, drawing international attention.
For Sullivan, the emerging importance of this find underscores a key truth about archaeology: artifacts often hold secrets that only later generations can unlock.
“One of the goals of historians — and archaeologists in particular — is to take great care with the materials we are lucky enough to interact with in modern times,” Sullivan reflects. “You never know when something will have importance to future scholars or when a new connection will be made.”
Sullivan acknowledges the challenges posed by incomplete documentation from past excavations.
“Today as a modern scholar, I’m often annoyed by folks in the late 19th and early 20th century because I don’t think they kept very good records,” Sullivan said. “We could do much more interesting historical analysis if they had. 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 story of the Umm el-Marra cylinders highlights the patience and collaboration that scholarship demands.
“These cylinders were unexpected artifacts, and their meaning was unclear to us when we found them,” Sullivan notes. “It has taken Dr. Schwartz years to research, develop, and propose this theory, but that is often how scholarship works. It is a process.”
