Almost everything the Near East contributes to the study of religion was unreadable two hundred years ago, and the sequence in which it became readable shaped the questions people asked.
Egyptian hieroglyphs came first, deciphered from the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s. Cuneiform followed, unlocked in the middle of the century largely through the trilingual Persian inscription at Behistun, and within a generation Assyrian and Babylonian libraries were being read. The immediate effect on religious scholarship was disruptive: in 1872 a flood narrative was identified in tablets from Nineveh that clearly predated the biblical one, and the discovery was reported to a public that had assumed Genesis was the earliest such account.
Ugaritic came later, from tablets found on the Syrian coast in 1929, and gave direct access to Canaanite mythology in a related language rather than through biblical polemic. Hittite archives from Anatolia supplied the treaty forms. The Dead Sea Scrolls, from 1947, pushed the manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible back by a thousand years.
The pattern in all of this is worth naming. The Near Eastern material was not preserved by anyone who valued it; it was buried, forgotten and dug up, and what survives is what happened to be written on clay or stone in places that were later abandoned. Whole traditions transmitted on papyrus or by mouth are simply gone, and the region's record is skewed toward states and temples that kept archives.