Last week, a middle school class in Sayville, NY invited an expert in ancient languages to come teach them about how alphabets developed. Afterward, the kids were given clay and wrote their names in Ugaritic as outlined on the chart below. From this hands on experience, these kids probably learned more about these languages in one day than most adults will ever learn! While ancient near eastern history is often neglected for the study of things westerners commonly find more exciting (ancient Greeks/Romans), it is encouraging that it is being emphasized to these young kids.
"Apprentices gathered around the master scribe who pounded lumps of clay into pillow-shaped tablets. Closely following all the instructions, each student then used a wooden stylus to impress a series of horizontal and vertical wedges into the pliant material—rendering a cuneiform writing system that predates the birth of the modern alphabet."
Read the full article.
Ugaritic is a West Semitic language (in the same family as Biblical Hebrew). It is named after the city where most of its tablets were found (Ugarit). The Ugaritic language was lost after a group known as "The Sea Peoples" destroyed Ugarit around 1200 BC. Since Ugaritic was discovered in 1929, it has been a help to understanding how Biblical Hebrew verbs developed. Also, it has helped show us the meaning of some words that are only used one time in the Old Testament (called a Hapax Legomenon).
A student writing her name in a clay tablet.
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