Scripts & Magical Alphabets

Ugaritic

Semitic Script Family

Origin Attested in tablets from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the destruction of Ugarit early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean.

Ugaritic is a cuneiform alphabet of thirty signs, pressed into clay with a wedge-tipped stylus in the same physical technique as Mesopotamian cuneiform but sharing none of its sign shapes and none of its principle: each Ugaritic sign stands for one consonant (three of them mark a glottal stop against a different following vowel), not for a syllable or a word. It was used at the city of Ugarit, on the Syrian coast, to write the Northwest Semitic language also called Ugaritic, and it survives only in tablets excavated at that site from 1929 onward, running from roughly the fourteenth century BCE to the city's destruction early in the twelfth. A school tablet from the site preserves the thirty signs in a fixed order close to the sequence later used for Hebrew and Phoenician, which makes it the earliest attested alphabetic order known anywhere. The script died with the city it served and has no descendants.

Facts

Origins

Origin Period

Attested in tablets from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the destruction of Ugarit early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. 1

Place of Origin

Ugarit, modern Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast. 1

Identity

Script Type

A consonantal alphabet in cuneiform wedge shapes: every ordinary sign is a single consonant, and three signs additionally mark the vowel quality carried on the glottal stop (a, i and u), which is more vowel marking than a true abjad but short of a full vowel-writing alphabet. 1

Attributions

Tradition

An alphabetic cuneiform script used to write the Ugaritic language at the city of Ugarit, recording some of the earliest known texts of Canaanite mythology. 1

Script type (class)

Abjad 1

Connections

Associated With

Mesopotamians

This source names Mesopotamians directly: "Ugaritic is a cuneiform alphabet of thirty signs, pressed into clay with a wedge-tipped stylus in the same physical technique as Mesopotamian cuneiform but sharing none of its sign shapes and none..."

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Phoenicians

This source names Phoenicians directly: "Ugaritic is a cuneiform alphabet of thirty signs, pressed into clay with a wedge-tipped stylus in the same physical technique as Mesopotamian cuneiform but sharing none of its sign shapes and none..."

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Ugarit

This source names Ugarit directly: "Ugaritic is a cuneiform alphabet of thirty signs, pressed into clay with a wedge-tipped stylus in the same physical technique as Mesopotamian cuneiform but sharing none of its sign shapes and none..."

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)