ABSTRACT
Ugaritic is the only well-attested example known today of the native languages of the Levantine area in the second millennium BCE. Various brief documents exist, as well as Amorite words in the Mari texts, or the "Canaanite glosses" in the texts from El-Amarna, but these highly fragmented sources cannot compare with the data from the Ugaritic language, for Ugaritic is attested in approximately 1,000 reasonably well-preserved texts (with many more fragments). The texts are written in an alphabetic cuneiform script on clay tablets and date to approximately 1400-1190 BCE. Only discovered in 1929 at modem Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, located on the north coast of Syria, they provide the sole coherent body of literature from the entire Northwest Semitic area for the period.
