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| Ugaritic | |
|---|---|
 The Ugaritic writing system | |
| Script type | |
Time period | from around 1400 BCE |
| Direction | Left-to-right  |
| Languages | Ugaritic, Hurrian, Akkadian |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Ugar (040), Ugaritic |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Ugaritic |
| U+10380–U+1039F | |
The Ugaritic writing system is a Cuneiform Abjad, consonantal alphabet, with syllabic elements used from around either 1400 BCE[1] or 1300 BCE[2] for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language. It was discovered in Ugarit, modern Ras Al 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 the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Ge'ez alphabet, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system,[3] and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.
Note that several of these distinctions were only secondarily added to the Arabic alphabet by means of diacritic dots. According to Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, 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).
The script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform and pressed into clay, its symbols were unrelated to those of Akkadian cuneiform.[4]
- ^ A Primer on Ugaritic, William M. Schniedewind (pg 32)
- ^ Ugaritic, in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia
- ^ Ullendorf, Edward (July 1951). "Studies in the Ethiopic Syllabary". Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. 21 (3). Cambridge University Press: 207–217.
- ^ Healey, John F. (1990). "The Early Alphabet". Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. p. 216. ISBN 0-520-07431-9.
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