Everything about The Ugaritic Language totally explained
The
Ugaritic language, discovered by
French archaeologists in 1928, is known only in the form of writings found in the lost city of
Ugarit, near the modern village of
Ras Shamra,
Syria. It has been extremely important for scholars of the
Old Testament in clarifying Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed more of the way in which ancient
Israelite culture finds parallels in the neighboring cultures.
Ugaritic was "the greatest literary discovery from antiquity since the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform". Literary texts discovered at Ugarit include the
Legend of Keret, the
Aqhat Epic (or
Legend of Danel), the
Myth of Baal-Aliyan, and the
Death of Baal — the latter two are also collectively known as
the Baal Cycle — all revealing a
Canaanite mythology.
Ugaritic was a
Northwest Semitic language written in
cuneiform abjad (consonantal alphabet). To the casual observer, it appears similar to Mesopotamian cuneiform, but was unrelated (see
Ugaritic alphabet). It is the oldest example of the family of West Semitic scripts that were used for
Phoenician,
Hebrew, and
Aramaic. The so-called long alphabet has 31 letters, while the short alphabet has 22.
The Ugaritic language is attested in texts from the 14th through the 12th century BC. The city was destroyed in 1180/70 BC.
The Ugaritic texts provide an unparalleled glimpse into the life and religious worldview of the ancient Israelites. The vocabulary is amazingly close to biblical Hebrew — many Ugaritic words are letter-for-letter the same in both languages. It is the religion of Ugarit, however, that's especially important to Old Testament scholarship, since Ugaritic is the ancient language of one of Israel’s closest neighbors, the modern village of
Ras Shamra, located in what is now Syria.
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