Alphabet Letters
Aleph (I)
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 (I) is the twenty-eighth sign of the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, standing near the tail of the abecedary order the Ras Shamra school tablets record, well after Taw and the twenty-two signs Ugaritic shares with Hebrew. It is a graphic variant of Aleph, the same glottal-stop consonant, distinguished by marking the vowel i rather than a; Ugaritic is unusual among the Semitic scripts for writing this distinction on its glottal stop at all. It carries no name and no pictographic sense of its own in any source: as a variant of Aleph it is understood to inherit that sign's identity rather than to carry an independent one. It has no separate Hebrew cognate, since Hebrew's own Aleph does not distinguish vowel quality on the letter itself.
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 NameNo name-sense is attested for Ugaritic Aleph (I): it carries no name and no pictographic sense of its own in any source, since as a graphic variant of Aleph marking the vowel i it is understood to inherit that sign's identity rather than to carry an independent one. 1 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 PositionTwenty-eighth 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 i vowel. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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.
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