In 1928 a farmer working the land near the Syrian coast struck a stone slab that turned out to be a tomb, and excavation of the mound behind it began the following year. The site was Ugarit, a wealthy port destroyed around 1200 BCE and never reoccupied, which meant its archives lay where they had fallen.
The tablets were written in several languages, but the surprise was a script nobody had seen: cuneiform wedges used not as syllables but as an alphabet of about thirty signs, cut for a West Semitic language. It was deciphered within about a year. Among the finds were small tablets listing the signs in order, and that order matches the sequence later found in Hebrew and Phoenician and, through them, in Greek and Latin. The alphabet as a fixed series of letters in a memorised order is attested at Ugarit in the thirteenth century BCE.
The archives themselves contain everything a palace and its temples generated: mythological poems, ritual and sacrifice texts, lists of gods with their offerings, incantations, letters, legal deeds and administrative accounts, along with correspondence with Egypt, Hatti and Cyprus. Some of the last letters found in the city describe enemy ships offshore and troops absent in Hittite territory; a batch of them was still in the kiln, unbaked, when the city burned, which is how they survived.