Alphabetic Cuneiform

Introduction

Ugarit was a small but prosperous trading city on the coast of what’s now Syria. In the late thirteenth century BCE it adopted a new kind of cuneiform which worked like an alphabet. This is the first alphabetic writing system for which we have large amounts of surviving material, including literature, letters, administrative documents and religious texts. However, Ugarit was destroyed in the early twelfth century and its writing was lost.

Cuneiform Writing

Alongside Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform is one of the first writing systems in human history. It was developed around 5000 years ago and was used to write the Sumerian, and later Akkadian languages. Cuneiform gets its name from the fact that it’s made of countless little wedge-shaped pressed into soft clay with the corner of a stylus. In Latin ‘cuneiform’ means ‘wedge-shaped’. Originally cuneiform signs were drawings of the things they represented, but over the centuries they became highly abstracted and very few retained their pictorial aspects.

𒀭 was the sign for the word for god. It was originally a drawing of a star.

Cuneiform is an extremely complicated system with a huge number of signs. Originally, in Sumerian, each sign stood for a whole word, like ‘god’ or ‘wood’ or ‘town’. When cuneiform was adapted for writing the Akkadian language, these Sumerian meanings were often retained, but the signs were also assigned syllabic values. In Akkadian, a single sign might be able to be read with one of several syllabic values, as a whole word, or even as a determinative. These weren’t pronounced at all, but told you what kind of thing the next word was.

In Sumerian, 𒄑 stood for the word GISH, which meant ‘wood’. In Akkadian, it could still mean ‘wood’, but the Akkadian word was ‘itsu’. This could be either a proper word, or a determinative telling you that the next word was a thing made out of wood. It could also stand for the syllables ‘gis’, ‘gish’, ‘gits’, ‘giz’, ‘is’, ‘iz’ and ‘its’.

This made cuneiform a very difficult system to learn and very few people were able to read and write. Most of them were highly educated professionals with jobs that required it of them. Despite this difficulty, cuneiform writing was extremely successful, and by the second millennium BCE, alongside the Akkadian language, it had become established as the international language of communication, scholarship, diplomacy and trade. In the Bronze Age Near East, Akkadian and cuneiform were a bit like English and our alphabet are today.

These two kinds of writing came together in the city of Ugarit, on the coast of what’s now Syria. Ugarit had its own king but was part of the Hittite Empire. It had been using Mesopotamian cuneiform for a long time, but around 1275 BCE it started using a new kind of writing as well. This combined the idea of the alphabet with the cuneiform way of writing. It produced an alphabet of 30 cuneiform signs which worked almost exactly like the other Semitic alphabets but which was written on clay tablets in a cuneiform style. Because these tablets survive well, we have recovered a huge amount of written material from Ugarit in both alphabetic and Mesopotamian cuneiform. This collection is the earliest significant body of surviving writing in an alphabet in the world.

Alphabetic cuneiform works almost exactly like the Phoenician alphabet. The biggest differences are that it was designed to be pressed into clay with a stylus rather than written with a pen or brush, and that it was usually written left-to-right like Mesopotamian cuneiform; not the other way round, as was usual with other Semitic alphabets (and is still the case with Arabic and Hebrew).

Like other Semitic alphabets, alphabetic cuneiform doesn’t usually write vowels. However, it does have an interesting innovation in the form of three signs which are almost vowels. In the ‘Write your name in Alphabetic Cuneiform’ worksheet, these are given as standing for A, I and U, but this is a slight oversimplification. These are actually three different signs for the glottal stop (the sound that replaces ‘t’ in certain varieties of English, such as if you say ‘battle’ in a Cockney accent). Which sign you used depended on what the next vowel was. So strictly speaking, these don’t represent vowels, but they get a lot closer to doing so than any other alphabet of the time. It would have been interesting to see how this system might have developed if Ugarit hadn’t been destroyed!

a = glottal stop + a                  i = glottal stop + i              u = glottal stop + u

 

Ugarit was destroyed at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE during the regional crisis that happened at the end of the Bronze Age. The alphabetic cuneiform writing system went out of use.

 

Pronouncing Ugaritic

Many Ugaritic consonants are more or less the same as their English equivalents, but several might need a bit more explanation. We’ve already discussed the glottal stops.

Ugaritic has 3 H-sounds. h is like English H; c is more ‘breathy’ or ‘raspy’. For Arabic speakers, it corresponds to ح and for Hebrew speakers to ח. x is like the last sound in ‘loch’. It corresponds to Arabic خ.

There are two T-sounds. t is like English T. v is more of an emphatic T, hard to explain in English. It corresponds to Arabic ط‎ and Hebrew ט.

There are 4 S-like sounds. s is like English S. e is like English ‘sh’, and 3 is an emphatic S or a ‘TS’, equivalent to Arabic ص‎ and Hebrew צ. Finally, there is a rare sign 1. This was a late addition to the cuneiform alphabet, alongside the two additional glottal stops. We don’t know exactly how it was pronounced, except that it was a kind of S.

There are 2 R-like sounds. r is like English R, or probably closer to the ‘rolled’ Italian R. 2 is pronounced at the back of the throat and is a bit like the French R. It corresponds to Arabic ghayn غ.

Finally, the letter o is unlike anything in English. It is a guttural consonant pronounced at the very back of the throat. It relates to Arabic ع‎ and Hebrew ע.

 

Questions to think about

  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of alphabetic cuneiform compared to Mesopotamian cuneiform?
  • Why might the people of Ugarit have created a new writing system with elements of both Mesopotamian cuneiform and Levantine alphabets? Why not just use one or the other?
  • How is alphabetic cuneiform similar to the Phoenician alphabet? How is it different?

 

Activity suggestions

  • Make clay tablets and have students try writing their names in alphabetic cuneiform.

 

  • Try making both alphabetic cuneiform tablets and Linear B ones. What do they have in common and what are the differences?

 

  • More advice and information on these activities is available in the Clay Activity Sheet in this resource pack.

 

  • Try writing the Phoenician alphabet on a clay tablet. How easy or difficult is it compared to writing alphabetic cuneiform? How easy or difficult is it to write alphabetic cuneiform on paper? You can find information about the Phoenician alphabet in the appropriate Resource Pack.

 

Related Resource Packs

 

  • Phoenician Alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is structurally very similar to alphabetic cuneiform and they were used for closely related languages in neighbouring regions. Both are descended from the alphabets used in the Levant in the second millennium BCE. The main difference is that alphabetic cuneiform borrows they way it is written from Mesopotamian cuneiform – it’s written on soft clay with a stylus, rather than paper with a pen or brush.

 

  • Linear B. Linear B is not related to alphabetic cuneiform; nor is the Greek language related to Ugaritic. However, both existed around the same time and are designed for writing on clay tablets with a stylus, but in very different ways. By comparing them, we can see different approaches to similar ideas about how to write in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean.

 

  • Unfortunately, there is no resource pack for Mesopotamian cuneiform because it’s so complicated!

 

 

 

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