Ugarit: Bronze Age Port City and Its Cuneiform Alphabet

Ugarit was a wealthy Bronze Age port city on the coast of northern Syria, at the site now called Ras Shamra. At its height, from about 1400 to 1185 BC, it linked Egypt, the Hittite empire, Cyprus, Mesopotamia and the Aegean. Its buried archives, written in several languages including a 30-sign cuneiform alphabet of its own, are among the richest sources for the ancient Near East.

Background: a crossroads kingdom

The mound of Ras Shamra was occupied from the Neolithic period, roughly 7000 BC, but Ugarit reached its greatest prosperity in the Late Bronze Age. The city covered about 20 to 25 hectares and controlled a small kingdom of fertile coastal land and villages. Estimates for the city’s population usually range from 6,000 to 8,000 people.

Ugarit’s power came from trade rather than armies. Its harbour at Minet el-Beida received ships carrying copper from Cyprus, grain, wine, olive oil, textiles dyed with purple, timber and luxury goods. Caravans connected it inland to Aleppo, Emar on the Euphrates and beyond.

Politically, the kingdom was a junior partner of larger powers. In the 14th century BC it corresponded with Egypt, and letters from its kings appear among the Amarna letters. Around the middle of that century King Niqmaddu II accepted the overlordship of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I, and Ugarit remained a Hittite vassal until its end, paying tribute and sending ships and troops when asked.

Discovery and excavation

In 1928 a farmer ploughing near the bay of Minet el-Beida broke into a stone-built tomb. French authorities, who then administered Syria, sent a team, and in 1929 the archaeologist Claude Schaeffer began excavating the nearby mound. Within weeks his workers found clay tablets inscribed in an unknown cuneiform script.

Excavations have continued, with interruptions, for nearly a century. They uncovered a large royal palace with numerous rooms and courtyards, temples to the gods Baal and Dagan on the acropolis, elite houses, and private libraries belonging to officials and scholars. More recent work was carried out by a joint French–Syrian mission, though the civil war in Syria from 2011 halted fieldwork. Further tablets came from the nearby site of Ras Ibn Hani, where a second royal palace stood and digging began in 1975, and from the large house of an official named Urtenu, excavated mainly from 1994.

The cuneiform alphabet

The new script was deciphered remarkably quickly, in 1930 and 1931, by Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud working largely independently. It looked like Mesopotamian cuneiform, made of wedges pressed into clay with a stylus, but it had only 30 signs. That small number showed it was an alphabet, in which each sign stands for one sound, rather than a syllabic script with hundreds of signs.

Three of the 30 signs marked the glottal stop combined with the vowels a, i and u, and the last three signs in the standard order appear to be later additions, partly useful for writing foreign words such as Hurrian. Scribes also used a small vertical wedge to divide words. Several practice tablets list the letters in order, known as abecedaries, and that order closely matches the later Phoenician alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet. A few tablets use a different order also known from South Arabian scripts.

The idea of an alphabet came from the linear scripts of the Levant, which were written with ink or scratched on surfaces. Ugarit’s scribes adapted that idea to the clay-and-stylus technology they already used for Akkadian. Most surviving Ugaritic alphabetic texts date from the 13th and early 12th centuries BC.

Archives, languages and myths

Tens of thousands of objects and several thousand tablets have come from Ugarit. They were written in at least five scripts and in many languages, including Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, Ugaritic, Hurrian, Hittite, Luwian, Egyptian and Cypro-Minoan. The texts include treaties, court cases, letters, lists of ships and workers, medical texts for horses and dictionaries giving words in four languages.

The best-known literary works are the myths and epics written in Ugaritic. The Baal Cycle tells how the storm god Baal fights Yamm, the sea, and Mot, death, with help from the warrior goddess Anat. The Legend of Kirta and the Tale of Aqhat are stories of kings and heroes. Several copies name the scribe Ilimilku, who worked under a king called Niqmaddu.

These texts matter far beyond Syria. They give the oldest substantial picture of Canaanite religion, with gods such as El, Baal, Asherah and Anat who are also mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Ugarit also produced a Hurrian hymn to the goddess Nikkal, dated to about 1400 BC, which carries the oldest substantially complete musical notation yet known.

The last letters and destruction

Late in the 13th century BC the eastern Mediterranean became unstable. Letters from the Hittite court asked Ugarit urgently for grain shipments, suggesting famine in Anatolia. Ugarit’s last king, Ammurapi, was also pressed to send his ships and soldiers to help the Hittites.

Several letters from Ugarit’s final years describe raids from the sea. In one well-known letter, Ammurapi tells the king of Alashiya, on Cyprus, that enemy ships have arrived, that some of his towns have been burned, and that his own troops and ships are away serving the Hittites, leaving the land exposed. Other letters warn of enemy vessels sighted along the coast.

The city was then burned and abandoned. A letter mentioning the Egyptian official Bay, who was executed around 1191 BC, shows the destruction happened after that, so most scholars place it between about 1190 and 1185 BC. Ugarit was never rebuilt as a city. Its fall forms part of the wider Late Bronze Age collapse, when many palace states around the eastern Mediterranean disappeared.

Myths and facts

Myth: The final tablets were found still baking in a kiln, abandoned at the moment of attack. Fact: This story was repeated for decades, but later study showed the tablets probably fell from an upper floor or a basket into a courtyard when the building collapsed. They were not mid-firing.

Myth: The “Sea Peoples” are named in Ugarit’s last letters as the attackers. Fact: The letters speak of enemy ships without naming them clearly. Linking the destruction to the Sea Peoples known from Egyptian records is a reasonable hypothesis, not a certainty.

Timeline

• c. 7000 BC: First settlement on the mound of Ras Shamra.
• c. 1400 BC: Approximate date of the Hurrian hymn with musical notation.
• 14th century BC: Kings of Ugarit correspond with Egypt; their letters appear in the Amarna archive.
• c. 1340s BC: Niqmaddu II becomes a vassal of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I.
• 13th century BC: Most surviving texts in the Ugaritic alphabet are written.
• c. 1190–1185 BC: Ugarit is burned and abandoned under its last king, Ammurapi.
• 1928: A farmer finds a tomb at Minet el-Beida.
• 1929: Claude Schaeffer begins excavations at Ras Shamra.
• 1930–1931: The Ugaritic alphabet is deciphered.

Why it matters

Ugarit is a rare window onto a whole Bronze Age society in its own words. Its alphabet shows that alphabetic writing and its familiar letter order were established in the Levant centuries before the Greeks adopted letters. Its myths reshaped understanding of Canaanite religion and the Bible’s background, and its last letters remain some of the most vivid evidence for how the Bronze Age world came to an end.