How to use the translator
- Type a name, a word or a short message in the English box. The cuneiform appears as you type.
- Tick Word dividers to put the small upright wedge that Ugaritic scribes sometimes wrote between words, instead of a space.
- Press Copy to paste the signs into a message or a document, or Save as PNG for an image on a clay-colored background.
- To read cuneiform, press the arrows between the two labels and paste the signs. If you paste them into the English box, the translator offers to switch for you.
SH, TH, KH and GH each become one sign, because Ugaritic had a letter for each of those sounds. Numbers and punctuation have no sign here, so they stay as they are.
The cuneiform alphabet
Cuneiform means "wedge-shaped". It began in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago and was written by pressing a reed stylus into wet clay. For most of its history it had hundreds of signs, but in the city of Ugarit, on the coast of modern Syria, scribes used cuneiform wedges for an alphabet of 30 letters, from about 1400 to 1190 BC. The chart gives each letter in the order of the ancient abecedary tablets, its transliteration, its sound and the English letters this translator writes with it. Tap a sign to copy it.
The letters and their sounds come from the Ugaritic alphabet table on Wikipedia. English letters that Ugaritic did not have borrow the closest sound:
- Vowels use the three alef letters: ʾa for A, ʾi for E and I, ʾu for O and U.
- C and K use the K sign, and X is K followed by S. Q has its own sign.
- F uses P and V uses W. Ugaritic had neither sound.
- J uses the Y sign, the nearest sound.
- SH, TH, KH and GH use š, ṯ, ḫ and ġ.
Some Ugaritic letters have no English letter at all, such as the emphatic ṭ, ṣ and ẓ and the throat sounds ḥ and ʿ. They are in the chart to copy, and they read back as their transliteration.
Reading cuneiform back
Paste Ugaritic signs in the other direction to see them as letters. Signs shared by several English letters read as their sound: ʾi as i, ʾu as u, and the K sign as k. Word dividers become spaces. Sumerian and Akkadian signs, which stand for syllables or words, are not part of the alphabet, so the translator leaves them in place and lists them below the box.
A little history
Ugarit was rediscovered in 1928 at Ras Shamra in Syria, and its clay tablets turned out to hold an alphabet written in wedges, alongside Babylonian cuneiform and other scripts. Some of the tablets list the letters in order. Those abecedaries are the earliest direct evidence of the "abc" order that later alphabets share. The script fell out of use around 1190 BC, in the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, and today its 30 letters are part of Unicode, which is what lets you copy and paste them.
For another ancient script you can copy and paste, try the Egyptian hieroglyphics translator or the rune translator.