Afro-Asiatic, Northwest Semitic · Ugaritic alphabet (cuneiform)
Ugaritic
𐎜𐎂𐎗𐎚 ủgrt, “Ugarit”
- Spoken
- c. 1400–1185 BC
- Where
- The coast of northern Syria, near Latakia
Ugarit's scribes did something odd. They knew Babylonian cuneiform, but for their own language they invented a wedge-written alphabet of just thirty signs. In it they wrote down the myths of Baal the storm god, El the old father of the gods, and the sea monster Yamm, stories that had echoes in the Hebrew Bible. Then the city was destroyed around 1185 BC, and its language was lost until a farmer's plough hit a tomb in 1928.
Where and when
Ugarit stood at Ras Shamra, a mound on the Syrian coast just north of modern Latakia. It was a prosperous trading city, linking Egypt, the Hittite empire, Cyprus and Mesopotamia, and its scribes worked in as many as eight languages and five scripts. Its harbour, Minet el-Beida, lay a short walk away on the coast.
Almost all Ugaritic texts date from the fourteenth to early twelfth centuries BC: letters, contracts, ritual texts and the great poems of Baal, Aqhat and Kirta. Excavations since 1929 have recovered roughly 1,500 texts in the local language, along with thousands in Akkadian. Many were found in the royal palace and in the private houses of scholars.
How it fell silent
Ugaritic died with its city. Around 1185 BC Ugarit was destroyed and never rebuilt, during the turmoil that brought down Bronze Age civilisations across the eastern Mediterranean. Its last letters mention enemy ships off the coast and the city's army and fleet away in Hittite service. The tablets left lying in the ruins are its last words.
There is no evidence of anyone writing Ugaritic afterwards. Its speakers who survived probably scattered into neighbouring communities whose languages, close relatives of Phoenician and Aramaic, took over. The wedge alphabet was abandoned too, while the ink-written linear alphabet of the Phoenicians went on to conquer the world. Ugarit's wedges had no heirs.
How it may have sounded
-
𐎁𐎓𐎍
bʿl
Say it roughly BAH-ah-loo/baʕlu/
“lord; the storm god Baal”
Only consonants are written; the ending -u is supplied because syllabic spellings of Ugaritic words in Akkadian cuneiform show that nouns kept case endings.
-
𐎛𐎍
ʾil
Say it roughly EE-loo/ʔilu/
“god; the god El”
One of the rare words where Ugaritic shows a vowel, because the special i-aleph sign carries it; the final -u is again reconstructed.
Your name, set in stone
Ugaritic writes consonants only, left to right, with thirty wedge signs. There are three alephs, for a, i and u, so a name that starts with a vowel can show it; the vowels inside the name stay unwritten.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Tablets from Ugarit list the alphabet in order, and the order is close to the one behind our own ABC.
- Ugaritic was deciphered within a year of its discovery, in 1930, by three scholars working partly independently.
- A Ugaritic poem calls Baal 'rider of the clouds', a title the Hebrew Bible later uses for its own God.