RAS SHAMRA— HARRIS 491 



In the long poems there are few errors in sign making (e. g. putting 

 in of extra wedges). But in some of the small texts there are many 

 such errors; in a few the letter n is regularly or usually made with 

 four instead of three wedge-impressions, r with seven instead of five, 

 and so on. It may be that some of these texts are exercises and 

 students' work; the syllabaries found with them suggest that the site 

 was a scribal school. Some have suggested that the less regularly 

 written tablets are earlier and go back to a time when the alphabet 

 was still not quite fixed ; in that case the signs which occur only in the 

 small tablets may be early variants, or characters which died out 

 when the script was fixed. But there is little evidence to support 

 this view. 



A few tablets have been found with the letters reversed mirrorwise ; 

 the writing runs from right to left, and the individual signs, too, are 

 turned around. Whether this had some magical significance is not 

 clear as yet ; the contents may be magical formulae. 



For our understanding of these texts, and of their bearing upon the 

 history of the alphabet, it is important to know their exact date. The 

 great store of tablets was found in debris in stratum I-B (c. 1500- 

 1365 B. C), but some of them seem to have been built into the recon- 

 struction of the contiguous temple, suggesting that they may in fact 

 be older than this reconstruction. The colophon of some of the poems 

 indicates that they were written dowTi (copied from older texts?) 

 during the reign of Niqmed, King of Ugarit; at the top of stratum II, 

 i. e., just before 1500, an Akkadian letter was found Avritten by a 

 King Niqmed of Ugarit. If both refer to the same person, it follows 

 that these tablets are of that time, c. 1500 B. C. Other tablets have 

 been found elsewhere in the ruins and may well be later, in stratum 

 I-B. 



It is quite possible that this alphabet was created during stratum 

 II, at Ugarit. How far the use of it or the knowledge of it spread, 

 we cannot tell until other sites have been excavated. In Beth 

 Shemesh, in south Palestine, there was found a tablet with a short 

 inscription in the Ugaritic alphabet, written in reverse. The tablet 

 has not as yet been successfully mterpreted — it may be in a non- 

 Semitic language — but it sufiices to suggest that the alphabet of 

 Ugarit was known over a wide area. 



UGARITIC AND PHOENICIAN 



The origin of the Ugaritic alphabet is unknown. It is all very well 

 to say that the scribes of Ugarit, using the Akkadian cuneiform, 

 created alphabetic signs for writing their own language, but how did 

 they come upon the idea of alphabetic characters? We cannot 

 explain it as a development from their knowledge of the syllabic 

 cuneiform, for the alphabet is no natural development from syllabic 



