Ugaritic

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.

Ugarit was a wealthy port under Egyptian and then Hittite influence, trading with Cyprus, the Aegean and Mesopotamia, and it was destroyed early in the twelfth century BCE in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. It was never reoccupied.

That is why so much survives. The archives were baked hard in the burning of the buildings that held them, and nobody dug them out afterwards. The result is a snapshot of one city at one moment, including letters written in its final weeks, and it is the reason a religion practised across the whole Levant can be known in detail from a single site.

The language died with the city, so Ugaritic has no descendants and no later stage, which makes it a clean witness to how West Semitic religion looked before the first millennium. The gods named in its offering lists, El, Baal, Athirat, Anat, Yamm and Mot, are the gods the Hebrew Bible argues against by name, and the divine assembly, the storm imagery and much of the poetic vocabulary are shared between them. Reading Ugaritic beside biblical Hebrew changed the study of both, and the atlas records this language as the principal reason its Canaanite entries can say anything at all.