Ugaritic

An extinct Northwest Semitic language known through the Ugaritic texts, which French archaeologists discovered in 1928 at Ugarit, including several major literary texts, notably the Baal cycle. It was written in a special alphabetic cuneiform script, an idiom related to Canaanite and Hebrew. The short script of Ugarit has twenty-two characters whose phonetic values are nearly identical to Hebrew, though not their visual form or medium: early Hebrew was scratched on stone or potsherds, while Ugaritic was punched into clay like cuneiform. A scholar of the period hailed the discovery as the greatest literary find from antiquity since the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform.