Ugaritic was recovered from nothing within a single generation. A ploughman struck a tomb at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast in 1928, excavation began the following year, and within a short time the tablets had been deciphered, because the script turned out to be alphabetic and short. It uses about thirty cuneiform signs, and a school tablet from the site preserves them in a fixed order close to the sequence later used for Hebrew and Greek, which makes it the earliest attested alphabetic order anywhere in the world.
The language is Northwest Semitic and closely related to Hebrew and Phoenician, close enough that Ugaritic vocabulary and idiom immediately illuminated obscure passages in biblical poetry. Words that had been guessed at for centuries turned out to be ordinary in Ugaritic, and pairs of terms that biblical verse uses in parallel were shown to be a fixed poetic stock the two traditions shared. Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee's manual is the standard modern teaching edition, and it presents the grammar together with the texts a student needs in order to read it.
What the tablets carry is the point. Simon Parker's edition presents the Baal Cycle, the tale of Aqhat and the tale of Kirta, the only extended Canaanite narrative poetry that exists, alongside ritual texts, god lists, offering records and letters. Before the excavation, the religion of Canaan was known chiefly from the writings of its enemies. Afterwards it had a literature of its own.