Ugaritic Abecedary
The alphabet is a fixed, teachable sequence: these school tablets assert an order of letters that Hebrew, Phoenician, and Greek would inherit and that literacy training still follows.
- earliest attested instance of the alphabetic order inherited by Hebrew, Phoenician, and Greek
- a cuneiform sign system reduced to about thirty alphabetic letters
- scribal training material rather than literary content
- a rival South-Semitic letter order attested on a separate tablet, RS 88.2215
Small clay tablets, evidently scribal school exercises, that list the thirty signs of the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet in a fixed sequence. Ugaritic scribes combined the wedge-shaped strokes of Mesopotamian cuneiform with the alphabetic principle developed further south, producing the world's only cuneiform alphabet: a small, learnable sign set instead of the hundreds of signs standard cuneiform required. The order attested on these tablets, beginning with the equivalents of aleph, beth, gimel, matches the later order of the Hebrew, Phoenician, and Greek alphabets, making the Ugaritic abecedary the earliest directly attested evidence for that sequence. A separate tablet, RS 88.2215, published by Bordreuil and Pardee, preserves a second, South-Semitic (South Arabian) order, showing that more than one letter sequence circulated at Ugarit.
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