Discovered in the ruins of a Syrian temple in Ras Shamara, this alphabet dates from 1,400 BC; it's use ended around 1,200 BC with the destruction of the city of Ugarit. Derived from both syllabic (symbols representing spoken syllables) cuneiform and contemporary Phoenician alphabets, it is the first cuneiform alphabet; the letters were scratched onto wet clay tablets with a stylus. The order of the letters closely follows the arrangement of the Phoenician and Hebrew letters. Unlike these neighboring alphabets, it is consistently written from left to right. The alphabet consists of thirty letters and a word divider symbol; only administrative texts included the full alphabet, since they needed the final three letters to represent sounds in the neighboring Hurrian language. The literary texts in the local language include a mythological cycle concerning Ba'al Hadad -- the Lord of Thunder, as well as stories of legendary heros. Read more ... The fragments that have survived give a taste of the treasures of the lost Canaanite culture.
