Introduction and history

Ugaritic is the name given by modern scholars to the language of the old city-state of Ugarit, present-day Ras Shamra, situated on the coast of Syria (35°35´ N, 35°45´ E). Tablets dating from the end of the Bronze Age (around 1300–1190 bce) inscribed in this language were discovered immediately after the discovery of the site in 1929 and continually since then; see Yon (2006) for an overview of the excavations. The decipher-ment of the script and the language was relatively fast; see Day (2002).

Important studies in the last two decades have also contributed to the understanding of its grammar. The most complete grammar of Ugaritic to date is Tropper (2000); for a detailed review see Pardee (2003/2004).

Gordon’s (1965; UT ) classic textbook includes a grammar, texts, and a still useful glossary. A number of shorter self-contained manuals have since appeared: Segert (1984), Sivan (1997), Tropper (2002), Schniedewind and Hunt (2007), and Bordreuil and Pardee (2009); the last has a larger selection of texts of various genres complete with copies, photographs, translation, vocalization, and copious notes.

Proto-Semitic

West Semitic

Central Semitic Northwest Semitic

East Semitic

Eblaite Akkadian

Ugaritic Canaanite Aramaic Arabic OSA MSA Ethiopic (Canaanite = Phoenician, Hebrew, and various dialects in Syria-Palestine;

OSA = Old South Arabian; MSA = Modern South Arabian.)

Ugaritic belongs to the Northwest Semitic branch of Central Semitic, a separate group within the West Semitic languages; the tree diagram is adapted from Huehnergard (2005: 162).

Since it is documented with texts dating from the second half of the second millennium, Ugaritic is also the oldest directly attested Northwest Semitic language. It still possesses linguistic traits that have changed or simply disappeared in the first-millennium Northwest Se-mitic languages such as Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Almost all Proto-Semitic consonants are still preserved in Ugaritic; the Canaanite Shift /ā/ > /ō/ has not taken place; the nominal and verbal inflection re-flect a more original situation that has been simplified in the later lan-guages; the genitive-accusative independent personal pronouns of the third persons still exist; the causative stem is in Š, in contrast to Phoeni-cian Yifʿil, Hebrew Hifʿil, and Aramaic (H)afʿel; Ugaritic has no definite article; the preposition min ‘from’ is lacking.

The Ugaritic tablets discovered so far cover a wide variety of genres:

epic (myths and legends in poetry); religious (rituals, lists of sacrifice, omina, curses); epistolary (correspondence); administrative (treaties, deeds); medical (hippiatric texts to cure sick horses); and pedagogical (school exercises, alphabetic texts). The standard editions of these texts are Herdner (1963; CTA) and Dietrich, Loretz, and Sanmartín (1995;

KTU); they also give the tablet’s museum number. Earlier studies often cited texts according to Gordon’s UT. The convenient numbering system of KTU has been adopted in many recent publications.

Close affinities with religious traditions in the Hebrew Bible, such as the divine hero’s combat against hostile forces, his victory, and the construction of his palace, have stimulated studies on the mythological texts more than the other genres, especially in the first few decades after their discovery. The great interest in using Ugaritic to elucidate Hebrew and vice versa is characteristic of the discipline known as “Northwest Semitic Philology”; see studies on the parallels between Ugaritic and Hebrew literature in Fisher (1972–81; RSP 1–3) and the online bib-liography of Smith (2004). In the last few decades, however, Ugaritic language and culture have more and more been studied on their own terms; for an exhaustive overview of Ugaritic studies, see Watson and Wyatt (1999).

Many other texts found at Ugarit are written in Akkadian, the com-mon language of the Ancient Near East of that period. These are deeds, letters, and a few literary texts reflecting the Mesopotamian literary tra-dition; see van Soldt (1999). Lexical texts with Sumerian, Akkadian, Hur-rian, and Ugaritic equivalences are of special importance. Even though they do not always give the precise meanings of the Ugaritic words,

such texts can give valuable information about Ugaritic phonology and morphology; see Huehnergard (1987, 2008).

The basic vocabulary of Ugaritic, especially the kinship terms and everyday words, belongs to the common Semitic lexicon. It has become customary to compare Ugaritic words with their better attested cognates in the later Northwest Semitic languages such as Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic, as well as East Semitic Akkadian. There are also a good number of culture words whose meanings are closer to the non-Semitic cuneiform languages such as Hurrian and Hittite. Comparison with Ara-bic can sometimes be problematic because of internal semantic develop-ments. Due to their distant relationship in time and place, Ethiopic and South Arabian languages are less exploited in Ugaritic studies.

Some lexical traits can be accounted for from the point of view of Syro-Palestinian dialectology. A number of verbs of movement show that Ugaritic is closer to Phoenician and Hebrew than to Aramaic. Thus, like Ugaritic, the first two have hlk ‘to go’, yrd ‘to go down’, ʿly ‘to go up’, yṣʾ ‘to go out’, and t

¯wb ‘to go back’, but Aramaic uses other words for these movements, namely, as attested in Syriac, ʾzl, nḥt, slq, npq, hpk.

In Ugaritic, ‘to give’ is ytn, as in Phoenician. This word is in fact found in the northern languages of Syria-Palestine versus the Hebrew variant ntn. Similarly, ‘to be’ in Ugaritic and Phoenician is kwn, whereas Hebrew uses hyy. The more frequent Ugaritic word for ‘to do’ is ʿdb and not, as in Phoenician, pʿl, or Hebrew ʿśy.

The Ugaritic personal names stand in the Northwest Semitic tradi-tion of name-giving, especially names expressing a personal god’s kin-ship relations with the name-bearer; see Gröndahl (1967: 1–85), Hess (1999), and Bordreuil and Pardee (2009: 74–78), which includes notes on divine names and toponymy.

2. Script

Ugaritic is the oldest alphabetically written Semitic language yet known.

The native alphabetic texts exhibit the following order of letters as in the three-line tablet KTU 5.6, which reads (with transliteration)

  g j d h w z H T y k C l ả b g ḫ d h w z ḥ ṭ y k š l m c n Z s  p x  r D

m d¯ n ẓ s ʿ p ṣ q r t

¯

q t e u S ġ t ỉ ủ s̀

The last three letters are an innovation in Ugaritic. The letter s̀ is exclu-sively found in foreign words; for the use of ỉ and ủ (and ả), see below. A small vertical wedge functions as a word-separator and is usually trans-literated as a dot. The conjunction w, like the prepositions b and l, is nor-mally written together with the following word. On the development of the Ugaritic alphabet, see Dietrich and Loretz (1988). The dictionary of del Olmo Lete and Sanmartín (2003) follows the Latin alphabetical order ả ỉ u ͗ ʿ b d d¯ g ġ h ḥ ḫ k l m n p q r s s̀ ṣ š t ṭ t

¯ w y z ẓ. Older lexicons such as the still useful glossary in Gordon’s UT basically follow the Hebrew order:

ả ỉ ủ b g d d¯ h w z ḥ ḫ ṭ ẓ y k l m n s s̀ ʿġ p ṣ q r š t t

¯.

3. Phonology

3.1. Vowels

The Ugaritic vowel inventory consists of three short vowels /a/ /i/ /u/ and five long vowels /ā/ / ī/ /ū/ /ô/ /ê/. The last two long vowels are originally diphthongs */aw/ and */ay/ that were contracted in all environments:

*/mawt-/ > mt /môt-/ ‘death’ and */bayt-/ > bt /bêt-/ ‘house’. (The circum-flex distinguishes this contraction from original long vowels, which are indicated by a macron.)

The Canaanite Shift of Proto-Semitic (PSem.) */ā/ to /ō/ has not taken place in Ugaritic, thus ảnk /ʾanāku/ = PSem. */ʾanāku/ ‘I’, against Hebrew ʾānôḵî.

The writing system of Ugaritic indicates vowels only when they are inherently connected with an aleph. Generally the three aleph signs ả, ỉ, ủ correspond to an aleph followed by a short vowel or a long vowel, i.e., ả represents /ʾa/, as in ảlp /ʾalp-/ ‘ox’ or /ʾā/, as in šmảl /šimʾāl-/

‘left’. The sign ủ can indicate /ʾu/, as in ủm /ʾumm-/ ‘mother’ and /ʾū/, as in rpủm /rapiʾūma/ (pl.) ‘the Rpủm spirits’ as well as /ʾô/ (contracted

*/aw/), as in ủ /ʾô/ ‘or’. The sign ỉ is more complicated because it not only stands for /ʾi/, /ʾī/, /ʾê/ (*/ay/) as in ỉl /ʾil-/ ‘god’, ’the god El’, rpỉm /rapiʾīma/ genitive of rpủm, and ỉn /ʾêna/ ‘there is’, but also for /Cvʾ/, that is, any consonant plus any short vowel plus syllable-final aleph as in tỉḫd /taʾḫudu/ ‘she holds fast’, mỉt /miʾt-/ ‘one hundred’, mỉd /maʾda/

‘very’, ‘much’.

3.2. Consonants

The Ugaritic consonantal inventory generally reproduces the PSem. con-sonants except in a few cases. Thus PSem. */ɬ’/ (cf. Arabic ض ḍ ) merges with /ṣ/, likewise PSem. */ɬ/ (cf. Hebrew שׂ ś) with /š/; these are written as ṣ and š respectively. The correspondences of PSem. */ð/ and */d/ are nor-mally written as d, which suggests a merging of these two consonants. In KTU 1.12 and 1.24, however, */ð/ is written as d¯.

In the following words, the letter ġ anomalously represents a con-sonant that corresponds to PSem. emphatic interdental */θ’/: ġmʾ ‘to be thirsty’, nġr ‘to watch’, yqġ ‘to be awake’, ġr ‘mountain’, mġy ‘to arrive’.

Normally ġ stands for /ġ/, the expected reflex of PSem. /ġ/.

Table 1 presents the Ugaritic consonants according to their articula-tory classification. The alternative symbols given between brackets are linguis tically more precise representations of PSem. consonants; see Huehnergard (2004: 142–144). In all probability, the emphatic conso-nants in Ugaritic can be described as glottalized. Here they are indicated with a dot underneath or, when the alternative symbols are used, with an apostrophe (’).

As in other Northwest Semitic languages, initial /w-/ becomes /y-/:

PSem. */warḫ-/ > /yarḫ-/ ‘moon’, ‘month’, PSem. */wašina/ > /yašina/ ‘he sleeps’. (An exception is the conjunction /wa-/ ‘and’.) Another common feature of Northwest Semitic is the assimilation of /n/ to a following

Table 1. Ugaritic consonants Bi labial Inter-

dental Dental Palato-

alveolar Velar Pharyn-

geal Glottal Stops

 voiceless p t k ʾ (= ʔ)

 voiced b d g

 emphatic ṭ (= t’) q (= k’)

Fricatives

 voiceless t¯ (= θ) s š ḫ (= x) ḥ (= ħ) h

 voiced d₋ (= ð) z ġ (= ɣ) ʿ (= ʕ)

 emphatic ẓ (= θ’) ṣ (= s’)

Trill r

Lateral l

Nasals m n

Glides w y

consonant: ảt /ʾatta/ ‘you’ < PSem. */ʾanta/, bt /bitt-/ ‘daughter’ < PSem.

*/bint-/.