An Ugaritic abecedary

Most of us don’t give much thought to the alphabet beyond the age of six, when we learn to read. It is easy to be so accustomed to its use that we don’t often consider there might be alternatives.

In fact, the alphabet we use now is just one of several competing writing systems and was by no means the first to be developed. Reading and writing were centrally important aspects of human civilisations which existed well before the invention of the alphabet. 

In an alphabet, one symbol represents one phoneme (the sounds which distinguish words within a language). Since the average language contains around 40 phonemes, the number of symbols required is minimal. Other writing systems use symbols which represent larger units of language, like syllables, words or concepts. These systems require that the reader learn a much larger inventory of signs –– of the order of hundreds, even thousands of symbols. This can take years of complex and dedicated study, and means that the bar for literacy is set very high indeed. 

As such, the invention and spread of the alphabet is of keen interest to historians of the ancient world. The object you see pictured here is part of that fascinating story. It comes from the city-state of Ugarit (in modern Syria), a kingdom which flourished at the time of the biblical Judges, over a thousand years before Jesus. This small kingdom was uniquely situated at the confluence of diverse cultural influences which brought about the invention of an innovative writing system — a unique melding of the alphabet and ancient cuneiform writing technology. Although Ugarit is not mentioned in the Bible, it stands out as an example of an advanced writing culture for a language closely related to Hebrew and in close proximity to the events of the Old Testament.

Cuneiform is, along with Egyptian hieroglyphics, the oldest attested form of writing in the world. It flourished for thousands of years in diverse cultures across the Ancient Near East, much longer in fact than our Roman alphabet has existed thus far. With readily available materials (clay and a simple wooden stylus) and virtually limitless combinations of simple wedge impressions, cuneiform transformed many ancient societies. It had one serious drawback, however. The system was highly complex, with hundreds of signs developed. These were used to indicate syllables (for example, the Akkadian word šul-mu (well-being) was written with two separate signs), or entire words (for example, the Sumerian word DUMU (child) was written with a single sign), or classifying signs, which preceded certain words and grouped them (for example, the “d” in the transliteration of the word ^dEN.LÍL represents a cuneiform sign used to indicate that the following word referred to a deity; in this case, the god Enlil).

The complexity of this writing system contrasts with the simplicity of the alphabet, an invention which proved to be revolutionary in its own way, and far more lasting. As far as we can tell, the first alphabets were used to write Semitic languages spoken further to the west, some time in the early second millennium BC (well over a thousand years after the first beginnings of cuneiform). The earliest shapes of alphabetic letters look like crude depictions of various objects. For example, the letter alpu 𓃾 (which became the Hebrew letter א ‬“aleph”, and gives us the word “alphabet”) pictorally represents an ox and means “ox”. Scholars have argued that these signs are actually repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs, used by Semitic speakers to create a brand-new writing system: the alphabet.

Enter the ancient city-state of Ugarit, located at the crossroads of these two radically different writing systems. The unique genius of Ugaritic scribes was to combine the versatility of cuneiform with the elegant simplicity of alphabetic writing. Ugaritic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, was written using the world’s first and only cuneiform alphabet, with a total of 30 signs. Scholars now believe that this unique writing system was probably invented some time around the beginning of the 13th century BC. For around a hundred years, it was used to create thousands of texts, from famous literary epics to ordinary and mundane economic lists of goods and individuals.

The particular artefact pictured here is called an abecedary, which is a list of all the signs in an alphabet in order. Its cultural significance is such that in Syria, where the tablet is held by the National Museum of Damascus, it features on the 50 pound note. The truly remarkable fact about the order of the signs it contains is that they essentially match the order of signs of the earlier alphabets we know of. This cannot be a coincidence, but points to the fact that Ugaritic scribes were adapting an existing writing system, instead of inventing it independently.

Ancient ABCs 

This table shows the respective Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Ugaritic alphabets written out in their standard order. You can see the resemblance between the cuneiform wedges used to form the signs and their non-cuneiform alphabetic equivalents. 

This is corroborated by the fact that some of the cuneiform wedges used to form the signs bear a remarkable resemblance to their non-cuneiform alphabetic equivalents. Although we don’t have many examples of alphabetic writing from the second millennium BC, the example of Ugarit, with thousands of preserved tablets (in contrast to other more perishable writing materials) points to the fact that it must have been far more widespread than current archaeological finds suggest.

In the first millennium BC, alphabetic writing spread to Greece, which borrowed the system from the seafaring Phoenicians (who came from around what is now Lebanon). The Greeks
added a new innovation: the vowel. Previously, alphabets had been almost completely consonantal. (Such writing systems are technically called abjads.) This was well-suited for Semitic languages whose words are based on consonantal roots (speakers are generally able to supply the needed vowels from context). From what we can tell, Greek scribes hit upon an ideal solution: they repurposed signs for Semitic consonants which had no corresponding sound in Greek into vowels (hence the “A” and “B” of “Alpha-Bet”; the Greeks had no consonantal equivalent for a Semitic “aleph”). From there, the alphabet spread to Latin via the Etruscans, a non-Indo-European people from what is now Italy, who were in contact with the Greeks.

The Ugaritic abecedary in the picture thus stands as a testament both to the adaptability of the alphabet and the ingenuity of Ugaritic scribes, who had the foresight to employ it with an ancient and highly versatile technology (namely, cuneiform). It also stands as a vivid link to our own English language, written with a writing system which, incredibly, shares the same ultimate origin as this little tablet.