Ugaritic

Ugaritic (/ˌuːɡəˈrɪtɪk, ˌjuː-/) is a Northwest Semitic language, discovered by French archaeologists in 1929. It is known almost only in the form of writings found in the ruined city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria. It has been used by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to clarify Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed ways in which ancient Israelite culture found parallels in the neighboring cultures.

Ugaritic has been called "the greatest literary discovery from antiquity since the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform".

Corpus

The Ugaritic language is attested in texts from the 14th through the 12th century BC. The city was destroyed in 1180–1170 BC.

Literary texts discovered at Ugarit include the Legend of Keret, the Aqhat Epic (or Legend of Danel), the Myth of Baal-Aliyan, and the Death of Baal – the latter two are also collectively known as the Baal cycle – all revealing aspects of a Canaanite religion.

According to one hypothesis, Ugaritic texts might solve the biblical puzzle of the anachronism of Ezekiel mentioning Daniel at Ezekiel 14:13-16; it is because in both Ugaritic and the Ancient Hebrew texts, it is correctly Danel.

Ugaritic (Unicode block)

Ugaritic is a Unicode block containing cuneiform alphabetic characters for writing the Ugaritic and Hurrian languages of the Ugarit city-state from the 15th-12th centuries BCE.

Some of the Unicode character names are reconstructions, and as such are not found in Ugaritic source texts.

References

Ugaritic alphabet

The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform (wedge-shaped) abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of Arabic (starting with the earliest order of its abjad) and the Greek and Latin alphabets on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other. Arabic and Old South Arabian are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes. According to Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (eds. Wilfred G.E. Watson and Nicholas Wyatt, 1999): "The language they [the 30 signs] represented could be described as an idiom which in terms of content seemed to be comparable to Canaanite texts, but from a phonological perspective, however, was more like Arabic" (82, 89, 614).