Syria's Gift to the World: Ugarit and the Oldest Known Alphabet

Every letter you are reading now — in Latin, Greek or Arabic script — has a distant ancestor on the Syrian coast. In the ancient city of Ugarit, near Latakia, people wrote more than three thousand years ago in one of the oldest alphabets known.

The discovery

In 1928 a farmer ploughing his field at Ras Shamra, about ten kilometres north of Latakia, struck the stone of an ancient tomb. French excavations followed and uncovered an entire city: a royal palace, temples, houses and libraries, and thousands of clay tablets in several languages.

An alphabet of thirty letters

Before Ugarit, writing in the region was complicated: Akkadian cuneiform used hundreds of signs, and Egyptian hieroglyphs did too. The scribes of Ugarit borrowed the look of cuneiform — wedges pressed into clay with a reed — but used only thirty signs, each standing for one sound. With thirty letters you can write any word. That was the idea that changed the world: writing within everyone's reach, not the preserve of scribes who had memorised hundreds of symbols.

Even more remarkable, some Ugaritic tablets list the letters in almost the same order that still survives in the Semitic "abjad" — the order of the alphabet is as old as the alphabet itself.

What Ugarit taught us

Ugarit left not only an alphabet but literature: poems and myths of the god Baal, laws, trade contracts and letters between kings, and the oldest known notated song (the Hurrian hymn). More in Syrian firsts. The city lived on sea trade until it was destroyed around 1185 BC, in the upheavals of the "Sea Peoples".

Visiting the site

The Ras Shamra site is open to visitors and can be walked in an hour or two: the palace gate, streets and the remains of houses and temples. The famous alphabet tablet itself is in the National Museum of Damascus. Combine it with Saladin's Castle and the coast, and read about the archive of Ebla, another of the world's oldest.

Site

Ras Shamra, about 10 km north of Latakia

Date

Around the 14th century BC

Letters

30 signs

Original tablet

National Museum, Damascus