Ugaritic Texts

The Ugaritic texts are a body of roughly 1,500 cuneiform tablets and fragments recovered since 1928 at Ugarit, known today as Ras Shamra, and the nearby site of Ras Ibn Hani on the Syrian coast, written mostly during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC in Ugaritic, a Northwest Semitic language previously unknown to scholars and recorded in an alphabetic cuneiform script. The best known portion of the find is a set of about fifty epic poems, chief among them the Baal Cycle, the Legend of Keret and the Tale of Aqhat, alongside roughly 150 ritual and cultic tablets, about 100 letters, a smaller number of legal texts mostly in Akkadian, and hundreds of administrative and economic records. The tablets also preserve the earliest known abecedaries, ordered lists of the alphabet's letters that fed into the later Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek and Latin scripts, and the wider site shows Sumerian, Hurrian, Akkadian, Egyptian and Luwian writing side by side before the city's destruction around 1200 BC in the Late Bronze Age collapse.