Ugarit:
Ugarit (known locally as Ras Shamra) is considered to be one of the most important Bronze Age sites in the Middle East. Ugarit was an ancient cosmopolitan port city situated on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria a few kilometers north of the modem city of Lattakia.
Ugarit became an independent kingdom in the 18th century BCE. The tablets found in the palace archives have revealed its military and economic history. The Canaanites had a golden age there from about 1450 to 1200 BCE when they produced great royal palaces temples and shrines a high priests library and various other libraries on the acropolis with their strong ships built from the cedars they became the greatest naval power of the age and developed many key principles of navigation. They traded textiles ivory weapons and silver with city the cities of the Mediterranean Mesopotamia the Aegean Sea Egypt and Asia Minor. Akkadian was the international language. Around 1200 BCE Ugarit was probably invaded and destroyed by northern tribes sometimes called the Sea Peoples. But other possibilities like a big earthquake a famine or a massive fire have not been ruled out. Its population then was probably less than 10000. Ugarit's location was forgotten until 1928 when a peasant accidentally opened an old tomb while ploughing a field. The discovered area was the Necropolis of Ugarit. Excavations have since revealed an important city that takes its place alongside Ur and Eridu as a cradle of Urban culture with a prehistory reaching back to 6000 BCE. The reason may be that it was both a port and was at the entrance of the inland trade route to the Euphrates and Tigris lands.
Texts and tablets discovered at this site reveal the use of eight languages at that time. Much of the diplomatic correspondence is in Babylonian the trade language of the region. Other texts have been found in Hurrian CrypoMinoan Hittite and Sumerian cuneiform as well as inscriptions in Hittite and Egyptian hieroglyphic.
Scribes in Ugarit appear to have started the Ugaritic alphabet around 1400 BC thirty letters corresponding to sounds were adapted from cuneiform characters and inscribed on clay tablets. A debate exists as to whether the Phoenician or Ugaritic alphabet was used first. While many of the letters little or no formal similarity the standard letters order (preserved in our own language as A, B, C, D, etc.) shows strong similarities between the two suggesting that the Phoenician and Ugaritic systems were not holly independent inventions.
Important artifacts discovered at Ugarit can be seen in the National Museums in Damascus and Aleppo.