Ugaritic script

Table with the Ugaritic alphabet (KTU 5.6 = RS 12.168)

The Ugaritic writing was from the late 14th century or early 13th century BCE, the city-state Ugarit v to 12 to its demise in the early century. In use. In addition to numerous finds from the capital Ugarit (approx. 1500 texts) as well as Ras Ibn Hani (approx. 200 texts) to the south-west of it, a few written documents outside the Ugaritic area, for example in Bet Shemesch , Hala Sultan Tekke or Tiryns , have been found .

The Ugaritic script is formally a cuneiform script , but has the structure of a consonant script , like various other Semitic scripts e.g. B. the Phoenician script , the Hebrew square script or the Arabic script .

There are at least two forms of the Ugaritic script: The majority of the texts are written in the dextrograde long form comprising 30 phonetic characters . The Ugaritic language written with it belongs together with the Canaanite languages and Aramaic to the north-western group of Semitic languages . There was also a mostly sinistrograde short form, which was presumably used for the writing of another language, such as Phoenician or a precursor.

Origin of the Ugaritic script

It is believed that the Ugaritic script originated from using characters from the region's well-known cuneiform scripts to write the Semitic phonetic system. The Protosinaitic script had already developed from the Egyptian hieroglyphs according to the same principle . This first alphabet script (more precisely consonant script ) was probably created around 1700 BC. Chr. In Egypt or Semitic workers or Semitic slaves . However, only a few texts have been deciphered in Protosinaite script, the exact meaning of which remains the subject of more detailed interpretation.

The Ugaritic characters

The following table shows the characters in the Ugaritic script and their alphabetical order.

The following tables show the characters of the Ugaritic script and their correspondence with the Hebrew alphabet.

											Ugaritic
alpa	beta	gamla	delta	ho	Where	zeta	ḥota	ṭet	yod	kaf	Ugaritic
U + 10380	U + 10381	U + 10382	U + 10384	U + 10385	U + 10386	U + 10387	U + 10388	U + 10389	U + 1038A	U + 1038B	Unicode
Aleph	Beth	Gimel	Daleth	Hey	Waw	Zajin	Chet	Tet	iodine	Cap	Hebrew
א	ב	ג	ד	ה	ו	ז	ח	ט	י	כ	Hebrew

											Ugaritic
lambda	mem	now	samka	ʿAin	pu	ṣade	qopa	raša	šin	to	Ugaritic
U + 1038D	U + 1038E	U + 10390	U + 10392	U + 10393	U + 10394	U + 10395	U + 10396	U + 10397	U + 1038C	U + 1039A	Unicode
Lamed	Mem	Now	Samech	Ajin	Pe	Tzade	Koph	Resch	Shin	Taw	Hebrew
ל	מ	נ	ס	ע	פ	צ	ק	ר	ש	ת	Hebrew

There were also eight additional characters that have no Hebrew equivalent and were partially inserted between the other characters and partially placed at the end of the row:

								∇	∇	Ugaritic
Ha	there	to	ṯanna	ǵain	i	u	ṡu	šinš	separator	Ugaritic
U + 10383	U + 1038F	U + 10391	U + 10398	U + 10399	U + 1039B	U + 1039C	U + 1039D	U + 1039E	U + 1039F	Unicode

Unicode

The Ugaritic script has been part of the Unicode standard since April 2003 with release version 4.0.

The Ugaritic Unicode block covers the range U + 10380 – U + 1039F.

Ugaritic according to Unicode Version 6.1 - Unicode.org chart (PDF; 109 kB)
	0	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	A.	B.	C.	D.	E.	F.
U + 1038x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
U + 1039x	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?		?

literature

Pierre Bordreuil, Dennis Pardee: A Manual of Ugaritic (= Linguistic studies in Ancient West Semitic 3). Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake IN 2009, ISBN 978-1-57506-153-5
Manfried Dietrich , Oswald Loretz : The wedge alphabets: The Phoenician-Canaanite and old Arabic alphabets in Ugarit (= treatises on the literature of Old Syria-Palestine 1). Ugarit-Verlag, Münster 1988, ISBN 3-927120-00-6

John L. Ellison: A Paleographic Study of the Alphabetic Cuneiform Texts from Ras Shamra / Ugarit. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002.

Web links

Omniglot
Non-Unicode fonts for Ugaritic script
Unicode font ( Aegean ) for Ugaritic
Ugaritic script
Section 14.8: Ugaritic . (PDF; 326 kB) The Unicode Standard 5.0

Individual evidence

^ Bordreuil, Pardee: A Manual . P. 19 f.
↑ Avraam G. Loundine: L'abécédaire de Beth Shemesh, in: Le Muséon 100 (1987), pp. 243-250.
↑ Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz: Rhabdomantie in the Mycenaean palace of Tiryns. The fragment of an ivory staff inscribed in short wedge alphabet (Ti 02 LXIII 34/91 VI d12.80 = KTU ³ 6.104) . In: Ugarit-Forschungen , 42, 2010, S. 141–159, Josef Tropper, Juan-Pablo Vita: The wedge-alphabetical inscription from Tiryns . In: Ugarit-Forschungen , 42, 2010, pp. 693–695.
^ Edward L. Greenstein: A Phoenician Inscription in Ugaritic Script? In: Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University , 8, 1976, pp. 49-57. Pierre Bordreuil: L'inscription phénicienne de Sarafand en cunéiformes alphabétiques . In: Ugarit-Forschungen , 11, 1979, pp. 63-68.
↑ ^a ^b Coulmas (1989), p. 140.

[1] Bordreuil, Pardee: A Manual . P. 19 f.

[2] Avraam G. Loundine: L'abécédaire de Beth Shemesh, in: Le Muséon 100 (1987), pp. 243-250.

[3] Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz: Rhabdomantie in the Mycenaean palace of Tiryns. The fragment of an ivory staff inscribed in short wedge alphabet (Ti 02 LXIII 34/91 VI d12.80 = KTU ³ 6.104) . In: Ugarit-Forschungen , 42, 2010, S. 141–159, Josef Tropper, Juan-Pablo Vita: The wedge-alphabetical inscription from Tiryns . In: Ugarit-Forschungen , 42, 2010, pp. 693–695.

[4] Edward L. Greenstein: A Phoenician Inscription in Ugaritic Script? In: Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University , 8, 1976, pp. 49-57. Pierre Bordreuil: L'inscription phénicienne de Sarafand en cunéiformes alphabétiques . In: Ugarit-Forschungen , 11, 1979, pp. 63-68.

[Coulmas_140-5] Coulmas (1989), p. 140.