Ugaritic alphabet

The Ugaritic alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (abjad) that was written using the same tools as those used to write cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet). It was mostly written from left to right, but not exclusively. It emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language and fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapsec. 1190 BCE. The inscriptions found provide the earliest evidence in history of systematic and large-scale administrative use of an alphabetical writing system.

The discovery of abecedaries in the Ugaritic alphabet also provide the earliest direct evidence of not just the "abc" alphabetical order but also the "hlḥm" order. Examples of scripts that have also used these are the Phoenician, Paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic square script, Syriac, Greek and Latin alphabets for the "abc" order as well as the Geʽez script from which Amharic was adapted for the "hlḥm". Many if not most alphabets in use today order their letters in one of these two traditions.

The Ugaritic alphabet has 30 letters. The Arabic, Ancient North Arabian 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. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere. The script was also sparsely used to write Akkadian but alphabetically. Although the Ugaritic alphabet is considered fully deciphered, a significant minority of terms written in it remain etymologically uncertain at best and do not always appear to belong to any Semitic language.

The script was first discovered in 1928 at the site of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria).