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The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform
Cuneiform

Cuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot...
 (cf. Akkadian
Akkadian language

Akkadian or Assyrian-Babylonian is a Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian language, an unrelated language isolate....
-Sumerian
Sumerian language

Sumerian was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian language as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC , but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia...
) abjad
Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T....
 (alphabet without vowels), used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language
Ugaritic language

The Ugaritic language, discovered by France archaeology in 1928, is known only in the form of writings found in the lost city of Ugarit, near the modern village of Ras Shamra, Syria....
, an extinct Northwest Semitic language
Northwest Semitic languages

The Northwest Semitic languages form a medium-level division of the Semitic languages. The languages of this group are spoken by approximately eight million people today....
 discovered in Ugarit
Ugarit

Ugarit was an ancient cosmopolitan port city, sited on the Mediterranean coast. Ugarit sent tribute to Ancient Egypt and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus , documented in the archives recovered from the site and corroborated by Mycenaean Greece and Cypriot pottery found there....
, Syria
Syria

Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is an Arab-majority country in Southwest Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Israel to the southwest, Jordan to the south, Iraq to the east, and Turkey to the north....
, in 1928. It has 31 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian
Hurrian language

Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC....
) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere.

Clay tablet
Clay tablet

In ancient times, small tablets made out of clay were used as a writing medium.From the 4th millennium BCE in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittites civilisations of the Mesopotamia region, Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed....
s written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the Levantine and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the Hebrew
Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. Five of these letters have a different form when appearing as the last letter in a word....
, Greek
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
, and Latin
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 alphabets on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet
Ge'ez alphabet

Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez language, a Semitic languages. In communities that use it, such as the Amharic language and Tigrinya language, the script is called , which means "script" or "alphabet"....
 on the other.

The script was written from left to right.

he time the Ugaritic alphabet was in use (ca.






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The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform
Cuneiform

Cuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot...
 (cf. Akkadian
Akkadian language

Akkadian or Assyrian-Babylonian is a Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian language, an unrelated language isolate....
-Sumerian
Sumerian language

Sumerian was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian language as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC , but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia...
) abjad
Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T....
 (alphabet without vowels), used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language
Ugaritic language

The Ugaritic language, discovered by France archaeology in 1928, is known only in the form of writings found in the lost city of Ugarit, near the modern village of Ras Shamra, Syria....
, an extinct Northwest Semitic language
Northwest Semitic languages

The Northwest Semitic languages form a medium-level division of the Semitic languages. The languages of this group are spoken by approximately eight million people today....
 discovered in Ugarit
Ugarit

Ugarit was an ancient cosmopolitan port city, sited on the Mediterranean coast. Ugarit sent tribute to Ancient Egypt and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus , documented in the archives recovered from the site and corroborated by Mycenaean Greece and Cypriot pottery found there....
, Syria
Syria

Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is an Arab-majority country in Southwest Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Israel to the southwest, Jordan to the south, Iraq to the east, and Turkey to the north....
, in 1928. It has 31 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian
Hurrian language

Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC....
) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere.

Clay tablet
Clay tablet

In ancient times, small tablets made out of clay were used as a writing medium.From the 4th millennium BCE in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittites civilisations of the Mesopotamia region, Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed....
s written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the Levantine and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the Hebrew
Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. Five of these letters have a different form when appearing as the last letter in a word....
, Greek
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
, and Latin
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 alphabets on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet
Ge'ez alphabet

Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez language, a Semitic languages. In communities that use it, such as the Amharic language and Tigrinya language, the script is called , which means "script" or "alphabet"....
 on the other.

The script was written from left to right.

Origin

At the time the Ugaritic alphabet was in use (ca. 1500-1300 BCE), Ugarit was in the very centre of the literate world, which by then included Egypt
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
, Anatolia
Anatolia

Anatolia or Asia Minor is a region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. It is a geographic region bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Aegean Sea to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Iranian plateau to the east and southeast....
, Cyprus
Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is an island country situated in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, east of Greece, west of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, south of Turkey and north of Egypt....
, Crete
Crete

Crete is the largest of the Greek islands and the List of islands in the Mediterranean largest island in the Mediterranean Sea at 8,336 km? ....
, and Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia is the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern Iraq, as well as some parts of northeastern Syria, some parts of southeastern Turkey, and some parts of the Khuzestan Province of southwestern Iran....
 / Elam
Elam

Elam was an ancient civilization located in what is now southwest Iran.Elam was centered in the far west and southwest of modern-day Iran, stretching from the lowlands of Khuzestan and Ilam Province , as far as Jiroft in Kerman province and Burned City in Zabol, as well as a small part of southern Iraq....
. Ugaritic combined the most advanced features of the previously known hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems, both of which had been developing toward more syllabic and less logographic writing systems, into an abjad
Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T....
.

Scholars have searched in vain for graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Recently, some have speculated that Ugaritic might represent some form of the Proto-Semitic alphabet
Middle Bronze Age alphabets

The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar undeciphered scripts, dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age , and believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabets:...
, the letter forms distorted as an adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus. There may also have been a degree of influence from the poorly-understood Byblos syllabary
Byblos syllabary

The Byblos syllabary, also known as the Pseudo-hieroglyphic script, Proto-Byblian, Proto-Byblic, or Byblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from ten inscriptions found in Byblos....
 that is sometimes called "pseudo-hieroglyphic".

It has been suggested that the two basic shapes in cuneiform, a linear wedge, as in , and a corner wedge, as in , may correspond to lines and circles in the linear Semitic alphabets: the three Semitic letters with circles, preserved in the Greek
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 T, O and Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 Q, are all made with corner wedges in Ugaritic: Tet, Ain, and Qopa. Other letters look similar as well: Ho resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while Wo, Pu, and Thanna are similar to Greek Y, ?, and S turned on their sides.

Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeography, lecturer, and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles....
 believes the alphabet was consciously designed, citing as evidence the possibility that the letters with the fewest strokes may have been the most frequent.

Abecedaries

Lists of Ugaritic letters have been found in two alphabetic orders: the "Northern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in the Hebrew and Phoenician, and more distantly, the Greek
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 and Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
s; and the "Southern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in the South Arabian
South Arabian alphabet

The ancient South Arabian alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Yemeni Old South Arabic dialects of the Sabaean language, Qatabanian, Hadrami , Minaean language, Himyarite language, and proto-Ge'ez language in D?mt....
, and more distantly, the Ge'ez alphabet
Ge'ez alphabet

Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez language, a Semitic languages. In communities that use it, such as the Amharic language and Tigrinya language, the script is called , which means "script" or "alphabet"....
s. The letters are given in transcription
Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a spoken language source, such as the proceedings of a court hearing....
 and in their Hebrew
Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jews communities around the world....
 cognates; letters missing from Hebrew are left blank.

North Semitic

’abgxdhwzhykšš'lmðnscpqr??ts’i’u
????????????? ???????????????????


South Semitic

hlhmqwšrtsknxbsp’cgd?zðy?
?????? ??????????????????????????


Letters


 
b  
g  
 
d  
h  
w  
z  
 
 
y  
k  
š  
l  
m  
 
n  
 
s  
 
p  
 
q  
r  
 
g  
t  
s2  
 
 
word divider


Ugaritic in Unicode

In Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
, the Ugaritic alphabet is assigned to U+10380 - U+1039F.

External links

  • [https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015436.html Ugaritic script] (Brian Colless - version 1)
  • [https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015476.html Ugaritic script] (Brian Colless - version 2)
  • (ancientscripts.com)
  • Omniglot entry on the subject
  • (includes Unicode font)
  • characters from the Unicode
    Unicode

    Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
     Ugaritic cuneiform script