Origin from 1400 BCE
The Ugaritic alphabet is a thirty letter consonantal script that was written by pressing a wedge shaped stylus into clay, the same way cuneiform was written. It emerged around 1400 or 1300 BCE at the ancient city of Ugarit, in modern Syria, and was used to write the Ugaritic language, with Hurrian and a little Akkadian also recorded in it, before it fell out of use in the collapse of the Late Bronze Age around 1190 BCE. It was mostly written from left to right, and three of its letters stand for a glottal stop together with a vowel. Tablets found from 1928 onward gave the earliest direct evidence of the familiar abc letter order and of the hlhm order, which the Geez script also follows. Its relation to cuneiform and to the Proto-Sinaitic script is still argued.
Facts
In Use Since (Year) Directionality (class) Classification
Script Status Compare
Number of Characters Connections
Is Of Script Type
Script Of
Source ScriptSource (SIL): Ugaritic (SIL writingsystems.info)
Additional Source Ugaritic alphabet (Wikipedia)Lead
In the Other Atlases
Originated In
Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject originated.
Source Ugaritic alphabet (Wikipedia)Lead, discoveryQuote, Lead, discovery
The script was first discovered in 1928 at the site of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria).
Sources
1. Ugaritic alphabet (Wikipedia)
Lead
It was mostly written from left to right, but not exclusively.
Lead, emergence
It emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic
Lead, end of use
fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE
Lead, letters
The Ugaritic alphabet has 30 letters.
Unicode
Ugaritic script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.
Lead, discovery
The script was first discovered in 1928 at the site of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria).
View the Source2. ScriptSource (SIL): Ugaritic (SIL writingsystems.info)
ScriptSource (SIL)Script description
Ugaritic was generally written from left to right with a vertical slash dividing words.
Script description, number of characters
There were thirty letters used, all representing consonants.
View the Source 3. Unicode Consortium: ISO 15924 Code Lists, Table 1
Unicode ConsortiumCode tableQuote, Code table
Ugar 040 Ugaritic
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.