Ugarit
A Syrian port city leaves a library, a pantheon, and an alphabet written in cuneiform.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 260 years
- Known to
- ± 30 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Ugarit on the Syrian coast is a wealthy trading city whose archives, found from 1929, are written in eight languages and include an alphabetic script of thirty signs rendered in cuneiform wedges — an alphabet using the writing medium of a syllabary. Its mythological texts about the storm god Baal, El and the goddess Anat transformed understanding of Canaanite religion and its relationship to the Hebrew Bible.