Ugarit (Ras Shamra)

Twelve kilometres north of Latakia lie the ruins of Ugarit — ancient Ras Shamra — one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. Ugarit was a Bronze Age city-state that flourished from around 1450 to 1200 BC, when it was destroyed in the general catastrophe that ended the Late Bronze Age civilizations. At its height it was a sophisticated cosmopolitan port, trading with Egypt, Cyprus, the Aegean, and Mesopotamia, and it produced the world's first known alphabet — not a syllabary like Mesopotamian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, but a true alphabet where symbols represent individual sounds.

The ruins themselves are atmospheric rather than spectacular: the remains of a royal palace, temples, and merchant houses spread across a low mound above the sea. The best finds — including the cuneiform tablets that revealed the Ugaritic alphabet — are in the National Museum in Damascus and the Latakia Regional Museum. But standing on the tell and looking out over the Mediterranean, you can understand why this was a great trading city for three thousand years. The site is reached by a short drive or taxi from Latakia.

things to do sight museum
A story
The tablets found at Ugarit in 1929 preserve one of the world's earliest alphabets — the Ugaritic cuneiform script — and include the oldest known musical notation, the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, dating to around 1400 BC. When archaeologists deciphered the tablets, they found not only the alphabet but an entire literary tradition: myths, legal documents, diplomatic correspondence, and economic records of a Bronze Age city that had traded with Egypt, Mesopotamia, Cyprus, and the Aegean simultaneously.