SANTA CRUZ — While a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, UC Santa Cruz history professor Elaine Sullivan unearthed ancient artifacts in Syria marked with an alphabetic script whose meaning still remains a mystery.
“I’m an Egyptologist and I was trained at Hopkins in their department of Near Eastern studies in Egyptian art and archeology,” said Sullivan, who became a history professor at UCSC in 2013. “I’ve worked myself both as a field archeologist and more as a historian.”
Sullivan is a renowned Egyptologist and digital humanist, or someone who combines a humanistic perspective with digital technology like 3D modeling to study past people and places, such as the ancient Egyptian funerary site, Saqqara. Sullivan authored a book about the Egyptian necropolis, published in 2020, called “Constructing the Sacred: Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara.“
In the early 2000s, Sullivan was part of a team led by Glenn Schwartz, now the archaeology program director at Johns Hopkins University. The team excavated a Bronze Age mortuary complex in Western Syria, near modern-day Aleppo in the ancient regional center called Umm el-Marra.
“During my training at Johns Hopkins, I got the opportunity to excavate with other faculty members,” said Sullivan. “I went to two different field seasons to Umm el-Marra in Syria.”
Sullivan visited the Umm el-Marra site with the Johns Hopkins team in 2002 and 2004. She said that the second time around she was more familiar with what she was excavating, but was still puzzled to dig up artifacts with marks that appeared to be writing.
“When I started in 2004, I knew what I was about to excavate, so that was interesting because usually when you go into the field, what’s exciting about archeology is that you never know exactly what you’re going to find,” said Sullivan. “I knew that I was excavating a tomb in 2004 and that it was part of a larger necropolis, so that wasn’t a surprise. But no one else had found any written material in any of the other tombs that had been previously excavated, so that was very unexpected.”
In the location at the Umm el-Marra site called Tomb 4, Sullivan meticulously unearthed four cylindrical artifacts. She said the ancient objects are each about the size of a finger and made of a clay that was likely lightly baked to make them more durable. However, Sullivan pointed out that they are still very fragile.
“These were much more breakable because they were somewhere between raw clay and that sort of highly fired clay,” said Sullivan. “And they are very small. Really the only reason that I found them was because we were excavating this tomb very slowly and carefully and making sure that we were capturing everything. So, we were using sieves. We were literally putting every single shovel full of dirt that we took out by hand through a sieve so that we make sure we would catch any little thing like beads and animal bones.”
When Sullivan first saw the inscribed clay objects, she thought it was strange because she couldn’t immediately identify the markings.
“I brushed it off and I knew it was different enough that I called Dr. Schwartz over,” said Sullivan. “I thought maybe he’ll know what this is and he very quickly thought that this is some kind of writing, but we didn’t know what it was and couldn’t identify it.”
Sullivan immediately realized that however strange, the artifacts were important. She went back and put the dirt she had already processed through the sieve for a second time to make sure she didn’t miss anything.
“I worked really carefully because when you find writing, that’s always an exciting thing in the ancient world,” said Sullivan. “I knew it was important. I certainly did not have any idea that it might be alphabetic symbols and that this would be pushing back our recognition of the alphabet by centuries.”
Schwartz noted soon after they were unearthed, he was drawing the symbols on the cylinders in the dig house of the site, and was dumbfounded by what he was seeing.
“If the symbols were examples of writing, they didn’t look like the kind of writing system that was being used at the time,” said Schwartz. “I didn’t know what to think.”
Later, using Carbon-14 dating techniques, Schwartz and other researchers at Johns Hopkins determined the inscribed cylinders were created around 2400 B.C., which predates other known alphabetic scripts by about 500 years.
“The characters are comparable to early alphabetic inscriptions that are found in Egypt and in what’s now Israel,” said Sullivan. “What was so remarkable was that they are from 500 years earlier than the earliest alphabetic inscriptions from Egypt or Israel and also, of course, because they come from Northern Syria, which is a long way away from where the others come from.”
Sullivan said that even now, discovering the cylinders at the Tomb 4 site was one of the most exciting archeological experiences of her life.
“As far as these sort of Hollywood archeology moments, I haven’t really had many of those and this was definitely the closest I’ve ever been,” said Sullivan. “The tomb had incredible, beautiful vessels lining the walls. We found a series of human skeletons, at least one of which had the bones in order. We found metal vessels, which are very rare, and jewelry. It was an incredible, rich and interesting burial. You can see what people valued by what they wanted to take with them in death, or what their family members wanted to leave with the deceased in order to supply them for the afterlife.”
Although the marked cylinders were dated, the alphabetic symbols baked into them have yet to be translated. However, Schwartz, who shared details about the cylinders at an annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research in the fall of 2024, believes that the alphabetic writing is of a practical nature.
“There were lots of ceramic vessels in the tombs, probably containing food and drink to sustain the dead people in the afterlife, and the cylinders that Elaine found were actually quite near these pottery vessels,” said Sullivan. “That’s why I think they were used as tags to provide some information about the contents of the pottery vessels.”
Schwartz said that if his interpretation is correct, scientists and scholars will have to reevaluate how and when alphabetic writing was invented. He hopes that experts in early alphabetic writing will take interest in the cylinders and help to decipher the meaning of the mysterious symbols.
“I’m an archeologist,” said Schwartz. “I’m not an expert in early writing systems. I am hoping that experts in early alphabetic writing will weigh in and come up with ways to make sense out of these inscriptions. This has started to happen and that’s why I wanted to spread the word because now that some people are agreeing that the inscriptions are alphabetic, that deserves wide attention.”
Sullivan is no longer involved with the study of the cylinders and is currently writing a book about the diffusion of ancient Egyptian objects through the modern world, with the working title, “Selling Saqqara,” which she hopes to finish in 2026.
Despite not having a part in the symbol’s translation, she is eager to see how ancient linguists will interpret the script in the coming years.
“I hope that the publicity that Dr. Schwartz has received over the past couple of months really means that the entire scholarly community that is working on early writing notices these claims, and once that happens, it will start a rich conversation where people can start debating what might these symbols actually mean,” said Sullivan. “I feel like this is the beginning of a larger process and I can’t wait to see, in the next 20 years, how that plays out.”