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The kingdom of Ugarit, on the northern coast of present Syria
has been an important center of culture and trade some 4,000
years ago. Located between northern Anatolian and southern
Mesopotamian cultures no less than ten languages and five
different scripts were in use at Ugarit. It is here that the
first alphabetical script based on simplified cuneiforms was
invented. The 30 cuneiform signs (below) bore no resemblance
to the signs of Akkadian or Babylonian cuneiform. Over 1,000
tablets of the Ugaritic script has been discovered consisting
of both commercial accounts as well as religious texts bearing
striking similarities to the stories written many centuries
later in the Old Testament. The reason being that the people
coming from the north still had the memory, through verbal
accounts passed from generation to generation, of the flood
that devastated their ancient country in Central Asia (see the
maps in Chapter 5, Climatic Changes and in Chapter 18,
Towards Sümer and Elam). These memories about an
ancient flood have also found their place in the epic of
Gilgamish, a Sumerian half god half human personality. But,
the flood did not happen in Mesopotamia, as many believe, it
happened in Central Asia.
A further clue for the Anatolian influence on Ugarit is the
tablets found in Ugarit written in
Hurrian, a language
which precedes Hittite and is of non-Semitic origin
(1). The
Ugaritic alphabet was first deciphered in 1930 by Hans Bauer
and Edouard Dhorme. The 30 cuneiform sings of this alphabet
are shown below.
E. Dhorme deciphered the name of the Ugaritic main deity as “B
‘ L”. This form came to be known erroneously as Baal
(2).
This is because the velar g -shown as g-dot in the last row
(second from left) of the above table- does not exist in
Indo-European languages, but does exist in Turkish (đ) as well
as in most Semitic languages. Therefore, one way of
pronouncing B-Đ-L could be BUĐULU or BOĐULU. Since the A
exists in the alphabet but does not take part in the name, one
can insert the U or the O which are not part of the
consonantal alphabet. In that case we obtain a meaningful name
as: Buđ-Ulu or Bođ-Ulu meaning “the holy bull” in the
Proto-language as well as in the actual Turkish (see Chapter
19, The Bull and the Letter B). A further understanding
could arise if we read B’L as Bu-Ođulu, meaning “the son of
the bull”, a distinctive way of defining the Ugaritic leader
shown in the picture below.
Here is an extract from the myth of Mot and Alijan, the two
sons of Baal (Buđulu), as a short example of Ugaritic
literature (3):
The days sped by,
The love of Anat overwhelmed her, as the heart of an antelope
for her fawn,
As the heart of an ewe for her lamb,
So was the heart of Anat for Bođulu.
The reason for selecting this extract is because Anat feels a
motherly love for her brother Buđulu. Anat could also be read
as Ana-Ot, meaning “the fire-mother” or equivalently
“the sun-mother” (see Chapter 8,
The Double-edged ax).
This way of reading Anat is acceptable since the letter “o”
does not take part in the Ugaritic alphabet. Notice that
letters in Anat (above) are all horizontal and
constitute the simplest cuneiforms of the Ugaritic alphabet.
From these simple cuneiforms we can guess that the words “Ana”
and “Ot” were the most frequently used words in the Ugaritic
language.
We see above the stele of Buđulu (Baal) discovered in 1929,
identified as the “storm-god of Ugarit”. One can see the horns
on his helmet and a spear that he plants to the earth. The
spear has taken root since leaves have emerged from its top
end. He also lifts a specter as a sign of power and threat.
The symbolism in this image tells us the following: “I
am here to stay and am ready to defend this territory”. The spear, the horns on his helmet tell us that he is an
Okh leader and the waves under his feet indicate that he
is or has a storming power. I am of the opinion that Buđulu
was a ruling king who was elevated to level of god height by
his entourage.
The Phoenician alphabet is generally accepted as being a
variant of the Semitic alphabet, but their origin is
different. The Semitic alphabet is a variant of the Egyptian
Hieratic and Demotic scripts, while the Phoenician alphabet is
based on Asiatic seals (see Chapter 13,
Evolution of
writing systems)
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