Other attributes
Ugarit is an ancient port city located 11 kilometers north of the Syrian city of Latakia.
The city was located on a 20-meter hill, which is now called Ras Shamra, at a distance of 1.2 kilometers from the bay, which was called the White Harbor, and now Minet el-Beida. The total area of the city reached 22 hectares.
Written language was found in Ugarit in different languages such as Ugaritic, Sumerian, Akkadian (the international language of that time), Hurrian, Hittite, Egyptian.
Ugarit is one of the few Bronze Age sites in the Middle East that remains special and recognizable even to the casual visitor, not to mention scholars or professionals or those who have the time to become familiar with the richness of these sites. Unlike other ancient monuments, here the palace and religious buildings were built of stone. While the brick buildings in the city of Mari and in the city of Ebla were quickly destroyed under the influence of rain, wind and archaeologist's shovels. In Ugarit, the foundation and stone walls are well preserved.
Ugaritic language -one of the dead Semitic languages. It was distributed in the state of Ugarit on the northeastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea (23-13 centuries BC), possibly in Northern Syria and even wider. Specific features of phonetics: "akanye" (Jewish ō, recorded in the Bible and Talmud, corresponds to Ugaritic ā); the preservation of the archaic consonantal composition, as well as the borrowing of the consonant ž from the Hurrian language. In morphology, the system of external vowel inflections in the name and verb is preserved (i.e., the endings of conjugated forms of the verb and the case endings of names that are absent in the northwestern Semitic languages of the 1st millennium and later); there are reflexive forms of the verb formed with the help of the prefix or infix -t-; the causative breed is formed with the help of the prefix š-; in the imperfect form of the 3rd person, masculine and feminine, in the singular and plural, the prefix t- is used; the article is missing. The vocabulary contains numerous borrowings from the Akkadian (and indirectly from the Sumerian) and Hurrian languages. Monuments of the Ugarit language (poetic narrations, ritual texts, business documents, letters) are written in a cuneiform quasi-alphabetic consonant script, which developed no later than the 1st half of the 2nd millennium BC. e. (see Ugarit letter).
