Ugarit

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An ancient Bronze Age port city on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, famous for its cuneiform alphabet and archives
2. A historic city of the late Bronze Age in northern Syria, known for its trading importance and early alphabetic writing system
3. The name of an ancient Syrian coastal settlement whose ruins reveal a major commercial center and a distinctive script

Etymology: Ugarit was a major city-state on the Syrian coast during the Late Bronze Age, and the English word came to us through scholars rather than ordinary speech. Such "learned borrowings" are taken directly from a source language by people studying it, not passed down through everyday use. Here the source is Ugaritic, the language of the city's own inhabitants, whose name appears as "ʾugarītu." The language written at Ugarit was a Northwest Semitic tongue, recorded on clay tablets in a cuneiform script that used an alphabet of about thirty signs. Its texts include myths, legal records, and letters, which is why researchers who study it are so closely tied to the city's name.