The Lexical Texts from Ugarit

Ugarit was an important seaport and therefore an international center. Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform existed side by side with various other languages and writing systems, including local Ugaritic, written on clay in an alphabetic system.

Alphabetic Ugaritic was only used for internal affairs; letters to the outside world were written in Akkadian. The writing systems co-existed and were used by the same people.

Multiple find spots in Ugarit yielded tablets and almost all such assemblages included lexical texts and/or exercises. Larger concentrations of lexical texts are only found in private residences where education took place. In one of these (the so-called Lamaštu archive) cuneiform is written in a Babylonian hand; presumably a teacher from Babylonia had set up shop there.

Lexical texts from Ugarit range from very elementary (TuTaTi, Syllable Alphabet A, Syllabary A), to very learned. Many exemplars of the thematic word list Ura are closely related to versions from Emar.

Among the most interesting lexical texts from Ugarit are the multilingual lists, which add translations in Hurrian and/or Ugaritic to traditional Babylonian compositions. Multilingual lists are usually exemplars of Syllabary A Vocabulary, but there is also an example of Ura 2 and of the Weidner God List. The multilingual Syllabary A Vocabulary texts display the format:

Sign – Akkadian – Hurrian – (Ugaritic)

Those exemplars that include an Ugaritic column write these words in syllabic (Mesopotamian) cuneiform, not in the local Ugaritic alphabet. The multilingual vocabularies have attracted much attention because they are one of the few resources for deciphering Hurrian and because the syllabic orthography of the Ugaritic words adds to our knowledge of their vocalization (the alphabetic system does not systematically write vowels).

During the 1994 excavation of the House of Urtenu at Ugarit a trilingual exemplar in the format Sign - Akkadian - Hurrian has been found. Although the text has no colophon, it no doubt belonged to one of the scribes in the family of Ur-Tešub, the secretary of the king, whose tablets were found at this location.

Further reading

• André-Salvini, Béatrice, and Mirjo Salvini 1998 Un nouveau vocabulaire trilingue sumérien-akkadien-hourrite de Ras-Shamra. Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 9: 3-40.
• Huehnergard, John 1987 Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription. Harvard Semitic Studies 32. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
• Malbran-Labat, Florence, and Carole Roche 2007 Urtenu Ur-Tešub. Pp. 63-104 in Le royaume d'Ougarit de la Crète à l'Euphrate, nouveaux axes de recherches, ed. J.-M. Michaud. Collection Proche-Orient et littérature ougaritique. Sherbrooke: éditions GGC Itée.
• Roche, Carole 2008 Jeux de mots, jeux de signes en Ougarit ou de l'influence des textes lexicaux sur les scribes de péripherie. Pp. 205-14 in D'Ougarit à Jérusalem. Recueils d'études épigraphiques et archéologiques offert à Pierre Bordreuil, ed. Carole Roche. Orient & Méditerranée 2. Paris: De Boccard.
• Roche-Hawley, Carole 2012 On the Paleographic 'Syllabary A' in the Late Bronze Age. Pp. 127-46 in Paleography and Scribal Practices in Syro-Palestine and Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age, ed. Elena Devecchi. PIHANS 119. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten..
• Van Soldt, Wilfred H. 1990 Review of Huehnergard, J. Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription, Atlanta 1987. Bibliotheca Orientalis 47: 728-36.
• Van Soldt, Wilfred H. 1995 Babylonian Lexical, Religious and Literary Texts and Scribal Education at Ugarit and its Implications for the Alphabetic Literary Texts. Pp. 171-212 in Ugarit. Ein ostmediterranes Kulturzentrum im Alten Orient. Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der Forschung. Band I. Ugarit und seine altorientalische Umwelt, eds. Manfried L.G. Dietrich and Oswald Loretz. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
• Van Soldt, Wilfred H. 2001 Nahiš-šalmu, An Assyrian Scribe Working in the 'Southern Palace' at Ugarit. Pp. 429-44 in Veenhof Anniversary Volume. Studies Presented to Klaas R. Veenhof on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday, eds. Wilfred H. Van Soldt, Jan Gerrit Dercksen, Nico J.C. Kouwenberg and Theo J.H. Krispijn. Uitgaven van het Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul 89. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Ugarit', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/ugarit/]