Tablet with a Cuneiform Abecedary from Ugarit
Unknown · Late Bronze Age II, circa 1400 to 1200 BC
A broken tablet a few centimetres wide, and on it one of the first alphabets in history. The signs are cuneiform wedges, but they are not the hundreds of syllabic signs of Babylonian writing: the scribes of Ugarit invented a system of only thirty signs, each standing for a single consonant, and pressed them into clay with a stylus. This fragment lists the letters in their fixed order, like a schoolchild's exercise or a reference chart. Seven letters are missing where the tablet is broken. Look at the neatness of the wedges.
The abecedary was excavated in nineteen thirty-eight on the north-west mound of Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, and allocated to the Louvre in the division of finds. Its order of letters, starting a, b, g, d, is essentially the order of the Phoenician alphabet and thus of Hebrew, Greek and our own. Ugarit was destroyed around twelve hundred BC and its alphabet died with it, but the same sequence survived on the Phoenician coast and went on to conquer the world. On this scrap of clay you are looking at the ancestor of the letters you are reading now.
Did You Know? The letter order on this tablet, a, b, g, d, is essentially the order still used in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets.
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