The alphabet: invented and lost

[timelets]

The widespread dissemination of cuneiform had other unanticipated consequences. At Ugarit in the fifteenth century BC new forces were at play in the history of writing. These led to the development of the first version of what is effectively an alphabet, in which thirty-one signs (including a word divider!Sissies!) sufficed to spell and record the Semitic Ugaritic language. The odd thing is that the signs in this new alphabet were also cuneiform, wedge-shapes written on clay in traditional fashion, but as simple as possible and quite unconnected with the Mesopotamian sign forms that had inspired them.

This Ugaritic script flourished in a context of a busy Bronze Age Mediterranean port, where the resident merchants no doubt spoke an abundance of languages and never lost a chance to do a bit of business, but it fell out of use after the city was destroyed in the early twelfth century BC, and the alphabet had to be invented all over again two hundred or so years later.