Syria has recently been the source of a very different kind of news as well. Examining clay cylinders found at an ancient burial site near Aleppo and dating to the third millennium BCE, a team of researchers led by the Johns Hopkins archaeologist Glenn Schwartz found a surprising inscription. Miryam Naddaf reports:

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 inscriptions might record people’s names or label objects in the tomb.

Archaeologists found the cylinders in one of ten tombs in Umm el-Marra. The burial areas also contained gold jewelry, silver vessels, an ivory comb, and pottery. “Judging from their contents, these tombs belonged to people of the highest social rank,” Schwartz said at the meeting.

Before their discovery, a script from 1900 BCE in Egypt was the oldest known alphabetic writing; it turned hieroglyphs into alphabetic letters of West Semitic languages. Hieroglyphs are not considered an alphabet because they mainly use pictures to represent entire words, rather than consisting of a set of letters that each correspond to a sound.

The discovery may have implications regarding the origins of the Hebrew alphabet.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”