Ugaritic alphabet

Ugaritic
The Ugaritic writing system
Script type	Abjad
Period	c. 1400 – c. 1190 BCE
Direction	Left-to-right
Languages	Ugaritic, Hurrian, Akkadian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs? Proto-Sinaitic script? Ugaritic
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Ugar (040), ​Ugaritic
Unicode
Unicode alias	Ugaritic
Unicode range	U+10380–U+1039F
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged c. 1400^[1] or 1300 BCE^[2] to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system,^[3] and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.

The script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform was pressed into clay, its symbols were unrelated to those of Akkadian cuneiform.^[4]