"These inscriptions might rekindle the idea of the location of where we have the earliest alphabet," says Chris Dobbs-Allsopp, who studies the Old Testament and Semitic languages at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.
"Judging from their contents, these tombs belonged to people of the highest social rank," Schwartz said at the meeting.
The characters do not correspond to a known language, but Schwartz compared them with characters used in West Semitic languages - including ancient and modern forms of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic - to decode them.
The cylinders are each one centimetre thick and 4.7 centimetres long, pierced with a small lengthwise hole.
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