Ugaritic alphabet

Ugaritic
The Ugaritic Alphabet
Type	abjad
Languages	Ugaritic, Hurrian
Time period	from around 1400 BCE
ISO 15924	Ugar, 040
Direction	Left-to-right
Unicode alias	Ugaritic
Unicode range	U+10380–U+1039F
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform (wedge-shaped) abjad used from around 1400 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 West and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other.

The script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform and pressed into clay, it was unrelated to Akkadian cuneiform.

Function

Ugaritic was an augmented abjad. In most syllables only consonants were written, including the /w/ and /j/ of diphthongs. However, Ugaritic was unusual among early abjads in also writing vowels after glottal stop. It is thought that the letter for the syllable /ʔa/, originally represented the consonant /ʔ/, as aleph does in other Semitic abjads, and that it was later restricted to /ʔa/ when letters for /ʔi/ and /ʔu/ were added to the end of the alphabet.¹²

The final consonantal letter of the alphabet, ś, was added to transcribe Hurrian words. It is the only Ugaritic letter to derive from Mesopotamian cuneiform.

The only punctuation is a word divider.

Origin

At the time the Ugaritic script was in use (ca. 1500–1300 BCE), Ugarit was at the centre of the literate world, among Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete, and Mesopotamia. Ugaritic combined the system of the Semitic abjad with the appearance of Mesopotamian cuneiform. However, scholars have searched in vain for graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Recently, some have suggested that Ugaritic represents some form of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet,³ 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.⁴) It has been proposed in this regard that the two basic shapes in cuneiform, a linear wedge, as in 𐎂, and a corner wedge, as in 𐎓, may correspond to lines and circles in the linear Semitic alphabets: the three Semitic letters with circles, preserved in the Greek Θ, O and Latin Q, are all made with corner wedges in Ugaritic: 𐎉 Tet, 𐎓 Ain, and 𐎖 Qopa. Other letters look similar as well: 𐎅 Ho resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while 𐎆 Wo, 𐎔 Pu, and 𐎘 Thanna are similar to Greek Y, Π, and Σ turned on their sides.³ Jared Diamond⁵ 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 (abecedaria, singular abecedarium) 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 and Latin alphabets; and the "Southern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in the South Arabian, and more distantly, the Ge'ez alphabets. The letters are given in transcription and in their Hebrew cognates; letters missing from Hebrew are left blank.

North Semitic

South Semitic

Letters

Ugaritic alphabet.⁶⁷ The last three letters (originally for writing non-Ugaritic forms) seem to have been added to a basic 27-letter alphabet.

Unicode

Ugaritic script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.

The Unicode block for Ugaritic is U+10380–U+1039F:

See also

Ancient Near East portal

• Old Persian cuneiform – a much later, unrelated attempt at a cuneiform semi-alphabet.

References

External links

• Ugaritic writing
• Ugaritic script (ancientscripts.com)
• Ugaritic cuneiform Omniglot entry on the subject
• Download an Ugaritic font (includes Unicode font)
• Ugaritic cuneiform characters from the Unicode Ugaritic cuneiform script