Alphabet Letters
Aleph
Ugaritic Letters
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Origin Attested in cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the city's destruction early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean.
Aleph is the first sign of the thirty-sign Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, opening the fixed order recorded on the school abecedary tablets from Ras Shamra. It writes a glottal stop released into a short a vowel, one of three Ugaritic signs marking that same consonant against a different vowel; the other two, carrying i and u, sit near the end of the extended thirty-sign sequence rather than beside this one. Ugaritic's own sources record the sign's order and its sound and assign it no name: the name Aleph, and the ox it is traditionally said to picture, are projected onto the sign from the shared Northwest Semitic naming tradition Hebrew and Phoenician preserve, not read off any Ugaritic source. The sign continues the same consonant as Hebrew's own Aleph, at the head of the same inherited sequence.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAttested in cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the city's destruction early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Place of OriginUgarit, modern Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Origin of the NameUgaritic's own abecedary tablets, found at Ras Shamra, fix the order of the thirty signs and, on the school copies among them, their arrangement into a teachable sequence, but no Ugaritic source assigns the signs names. Where a sign continues a Northwest Semitic consonant also written in Hebrew, this atlas carries the traditional name and pictographic sense those later alphabets preserve, understood as a scholarly projection rather than an attestation for Ugaritic itself. Signs unique to Ugaritic, and the sign added at the tail of the longer abecedaries, carry no traditional name at all. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Sense of the NameUgaritic's own abecedaries record this sign's position and sound but assign it no name of its own; the sense given here is the traditional Northwest Semitic gloss carried by its Hebrew cognate, projected onto the Ugaritic sign by scholarly convention rather than attested for Ugaritic directly. Identity
Script TypeAn abjad: thirty wedge-shaped cuneiform signs record consonants, impressed in clay in the order later shared by the Hebrew and Phoenician abjads, with three of the signs dedicated to the glottal stop aleph before the vowels a, i and u. 1 PositionFirst of thirty in the Ugaritic alphabet, in the order recorded by the school abecedary tablets from Ras Shamra, the earliest attested alphabetic order known. 1 Attributions
Associated SoundA glottal stop released into a short a vowel. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Phoenicians directly: "Aleph is the first sign of the thirty-sign Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, opening the fixed order recorded on the school abecedary tablets from Ras Shamra."
Related To
A graphic variant of the same glottal-stop consonant, marking the vowel i rather than a; Ugaritic writes this vowel distinction on its glottal stop where most other Semitic abjads do not.
A graphic variant of the same glottal-stop consonant, marking the vowel u rather than a; Ugaritic writes this vowel distinction on its glottal stop where most other Semitic abjads do not.
Both signs continue the same Northwest Semitic consonant inherited from a shared abjad ancestor; this is a cognate correspondence, not a borrowing in either direction. Ugaritic and Hebrew share the same twenty-two-consonant core, with Ugaritic adding six further signs Hebrew never developed separately.
Sources
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