Writing
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age of the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion.
McClelland sherd
The ostracon displays a series of incisions in the pottery that have been suggested to be an early type of Bronze Age writing. The text has been compared to Byblian pseudo-hieroglyphic, but also Minoan Linear A and Linear B, Anatolian, Canaanite and various other old languages. It is regarded as a rare trace of early written communication and important for further academic investigation. The pottery sherd shows a badly defined row of symbols in what some consider to be an abstract linear rather than pictographic form of character. It has not been reliably dated however suggestions have been made of c. 1800 BC or earlier. It has a double rope moulding that is similar to other Middle Bronze Age pottery from the Euphrates valley area of Syria. Dr. Cherie J. Lenzen has also suggested similar features were noted on pottery found at Tell Irbid in northern Jordan. Despite calls for dismissal or denial of the sherd as a "by-form" of the alphabet by Frank M. Cross, Mendenhall has said that the sherd "clearly exhibits both the "dâl" and the "thâ" of later Eastern alphabets". He states "the sherd is perhaps older than any other alphabetic inscription so far discovered".