CHAPTER FOUR
THE UGARITIC LANGUAGE
1T D U
K J. C
1.1 Introduction The decipherment of Ugaritic is associated with the names of three persons in particular: Hans Bauer, Edouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud. The first lot of tablets, which had been discovered at Ras Shamra in May 1929, was brought to Paris and given to Virol- leaud for cleaning, transcription and decipherment. It was immedi- ately clear to the French Assyriologist that the tablets comprised two quite distinct kinds of documents—some in a well-known language, Akkadian, but many others in an unknown language written in an extremely simplified cuneiform (Virolleaud 1929, 305–6). The num- ber of signs was twenty-six or twenty-seven, so the script was almost certainly an alphabet. Virolleaud thought, quite rightly, that the deci- pherment of the newly discovered cuneiform writing would be made easier because the words were generally separated from one another by a vertical sign. He also noticed that the words were short, con- sisting of one, two, three or four letters, and he concluded that the vowels were not written.
1.2 Charles Virolleaud Virolleaud provided a starting-point for the decipherment of the Ras Shamra alphabet by his acute observation that a short text engraved on four of five bronze axes or adzes also occurred in the first line of one of the clay tablets (1929, 306–7). The text on the tablet was preceded by another single-letter word . Since contemporary Akkadian letters began with the preposition ana, ‘to’, it seemed likely that was also a preposition. A fifth adze had the same inscrip- 77 tion but the words were preceded by another word of four letters: . Virolleaud suggested that this word should mean ‘axe’, pointing to a tenth-century arrow-head from Sidon: KAI 20 ˙ß 'd’, ‘the arrow-head of Addo’. Thus the first word must denote the object on which it is written and the second word has to be the name of the owner. Virolleaud believed that in the absence of a bilingual inscription, success in working out the meaning of the words on the adzes would lead to the decipherment of other texts. In this his first paper, which was the text of his communication to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on 20 September 1929, he made no hard suggestions as to the identity of the language. He excluded ‘Mittannian’, then suggested that perhaps a search should be made in Asia Minor for the key to the new writing, and even wondered whether Cypriot colonists had invented the cuneiform alphabet. More to the point, although he did not realise it at the time, he posed the question whether the Ras Shamra alphabet was older than that of the Phoenicians or was an imitation or adaptation of it (V 1929, 310). Some months later, however, Virolleaud was expressing the view that the search for decipherment should be directed towards Cyprus and the Aegean world: ‘Malgré la difficulté actuelle d’un déchiffrement, il faut probablement orienter la recherche vers Chypre et le monde égéen’ (V 1930, 353).
1.3 René Dussaud It is worth mentioning that, at an early stage, René Dussaud (D 1929, 298–9 n. 3) was firmly of the view that the alphabetic writ- ing of Ras Shamra had been invented under the influence of the Phoenician alphabet; but he did not elaborate on his views. In a monograph published eight years later (D 1937, 49 n. 2), he recalled that Virolleaud in his communications of 20 Sept. 1929 and 14 Feb. 1930, and in his publication of the texts discovered in 1929, did not yet regard the new cuneiform characters of Ras Shamra as letters of the ‘proto-Phoenician’ alphabet. However, Virolleaud’s observations about the inscriptions on the five adzes were very use- ful indeed, as will be seen below, and his generosity in publishing the newly discovered texts as soon as possible, so that scholars could study them, was very laudable. The account of his contribution to the decipherment of Ugaritic must properly be given below after the contributions of Bauer and Dhorme have been described.