How it works
The Ugaritic alphabet to copy, letter by letter: the 30 cuneiform letters in their ancient order, then the word divider. It was mostly written left to right.
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The earliest evidence of an ABC
Alphabet tablets from Ugarit are the earliest direct evidence of two letter orders. One starts ʾa, b, g: the abc order that the Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets have also used. The other starts h, l, ḥ, m, as the Geʽez script does. The tiles follow the first.
Three letters carry a vowel
In most syllables only the consonants were written. 𐎀 Alpa, 𐎛 I and 𐎜 U are the exception: each is a glottal stop followed by a, i or u. I and U close the alphabet with 𐎝 Ssu, and these last three were probably developed to write other languages first.
- 𐎘 Thanna, 𐎙 Ghain and 𐎏 Dhal are not drawn the same way in every modern reference, and some Latin spellings differ too.
- The names under the tiles are Unicode's. Some are reconstructed; others appear in an early fragmentary document.
- A device with no font for this script shows empty boxes; the Latin letter under each tile still reads.
Questions and answers
How many letters are in the Ugaritic alphabet?
30. Two shorter variants existed, of 27 and of 22 letters, found mainly away from Ugarit and usually written right to left. Unicode has the 30 letters and the word divider in the Ugaritic block, U+10380 to U+1039F, since version 4.0 of April 2003.
What do the Ugaritic letters sound like?
A letter written with a plain Latin letter sounds as that letter suggests. Among the rest, Kha is [x], Hota [ħ], Shin [ʃ], Dhal [ð], Thanna [θ], Ghain [ɣ] and Ain [ʕ]; Tet, Zu and Sade are [tˤ], [θˤ] and [sˤ].
How old is the Ugarit alphabet?
It emerged around 1400 or 1300 BCE and fell out of use around 1190 BCE, amid the Late Bronze Age collapse. The tablets come from ancient Ugarit, now Ras Shamra on the coast of Syria, a site uncovered in 1928.
Is the Ugaritic script cuneiform?
In how it was written, yes: a wedge-shaped stylus pressed into a clay tablet. But it is an alphabet. Where its shapes come from is not settled: one hypothesis is a cuneiform system such as Akkadian, another the Proto-Sinaitic script.