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| Ugaritic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | ancient Ugarit | |
| Language extinction: | 12th century BC | |
| Language family: | Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Ugaritic |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | uga | |
| ISO 639-3: | uga | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Ugaritic language, discovered by French archaeologists in 1928, is known only in the form of writings found in the lost city of Ugarit, near the modern village of Ras Shamra, Syria. It has been extremely important for scholars of the Old Testament in clarifying Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed more of the way in which ancient Israelite culture finds parallels in the neighboring cultures.
Ugaritic was "the greatest literary discovery from antiquity since the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform". Literary texts discovered at Ugarit include the Legend of Keret, the Aqhat Epic (or Legend of Danel), the Myth of Baal-Aliyan, and the Death of Baal — the latter two are also collectively known as the Baal Cycle — all revealing a Canaanite mythology.
Ugaritic was a Northwest Semitic language written in cuneiform abjad (consonantal alphabet). To the casual observer, it appears similar to Mesopotamian cuneiform, but was unrelated (see Ugaritic alphabet). It is the oldest example of the family of West Semitic scripts that were used for Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. The so-called long alphabet has 31 letters, while the short alphabet has 22.
The Ugaritic language is attested in texts from the 14th through the 12th century BC.[1] The city was destroyed in 1180/70 BC.
The Ugaritic texts provide an unparalleled glimpse into the life and religious worldview of the ancient Israelites. The vocabulary is amazingly close to biblical Hebrew — many Ugaritic words are letter-for-letter the same in both languages. It is the religion of Ugarit, however, that is especially important to Old Testament scholarship, since Ugaritic is the ancient language of one of Israel’s closest neighbors, the modern village of Ras Shamra, located in what is now Syria.
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Notes
References
- General: Gordon, Cyrus Herzl (1965). The Ancient Near East. W.W. Norton & Company Press. ISBN 0-393-00275-6. at p. 99.
- Text edition of mythological texts: Gibson, John C.L. (1977). Canaanite Myths and Legends. T. & T. Clark. ISBN 0-567-02351-6. This contains Latin-alphabet transliterations of the Ugaritic texts and facing translations in English.
- Text Edition: (including introductions, transcriptions, English translations, and notes) is Parker, Simon B. (editor) (1997). Ugaritic Narrative Poetry: Writings from the Ancient World Society of Biblical Literature. Atlanta: Scholars Press. ISBN 0-7885-0337-5.
- Lexica: del Olmo Lete, Gregorio; & Sanmartín, Joaquín (2004). A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 90-04-13694-0. (2 vols), (originally in Spanish, translated by W.G.E. Watson).
- Grammars: J. Tropper, Ugartische Grammatik, AOAT 273, Münster, Ugarit Verlag, 2000. Online Review of Tropper 2000 by Dennis Pardee. A more concise grammar: Sivan, Daniel (1997). A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch Der Orientalistik). Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 90-04-10614-6..
- Concordance: J-L. Cunchillos and Juan-Pablo Vita, A Concordance of Ugaritic Words Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003. ISBN 1-59333-258-0. Also available from Logos Bible Software
See also
External links
- Kadash Kinahnu: Complete Directory (Contains the complete version of the Ugaritic Baʻal cycle – based on various translations – in frames mode and no frames mode. Search on "Baʻal".)
- Ugarit and the Bible (An excerpt from an online introductory course on Ugaritic grammar (the Quartz Hill School of Theology's course noted in the links below); includes a cursory discussion on the relationship between Ugaritic and Old Testament/Hebrew Bible literature.)
- BBCi website: "El in the Ugaritic tablets" gives many attributes of the Ugaritic creator and his consort Athirat.
- Abstract of Mark Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Text.
- Introduction to Ugaritic Grammar (Quartz Hill School of Theology)
- Unicode Chart
- What's Ugaritic Got to Do with Anything? by Michael Heiser, Ph.D.
