Ugaritic

Ugaritic is a Northwest Semitic language that was spoken in the ancient city-state of Ugarit, located at Ras Shamra in present-day Syria. The surviving texts date to roughly the 14th–13th centuries BCE and form one of the oldest substantial corpses of Northwest Semitic writing, providing detailed insight into religious, administrative, and literary life in the Bronze Age Levant.

The language is written in a distinctive cuneiform alphabetic script. The Ugaritic script uses about 30 signs representing consonants and is read left to right on clay tablets. Vowels are generally not indicated in the writing, so scholars reconstruct pronunciations through linguistic analysis. The script represents a notable early transition toward alphabetic organization within a cuneiform-writing tradition.

Linguistically, Ugaritic is closely related to other Northwest Semitic languages, particularly Biblical Hebrew and Phoenician, and it preserves some features not always evident in later Aramaic or Hebrew. The corpus includes mythological narratives (notably the Baal Cycle and the Legend of Keret), prayers, treaties, administrative texts, letters, and lexical lists. These texts provide crucial data for the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the proto-Northwest Semitic world and enrich comparisons with Akkadian and other neighboring languages.

The tablets were discovered during excavations at Ras Shamra in the 1920s by a French archaeological team. Since their publication, Ugaritic has influenced the study of the Hebrew Bible, ancient Near Eastern religion, and Semitic philology, and it remains a key source for understanding the linguistic and cultural milieu of the ancient Levant.