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Syria’s Mediterranean coast, where the earliest known ordered alphabet was written into clay
A turquoise bay below a forested headland on the Syrian Mediterranean coast. Photo by Fadi Alagi on Unsplash · Unsplash Licence
The green Syria people do not expect: pine and cedar slopes above the Mediterranean, black-sand beaches at Ras al-Bassit, and village kitchens where lunch takes three hours because it should.
At Ras Shamra, a few kilometres north of the city, excavations from 1929 uncovered Ugarit and its cuneiform tablets — including the Ugaritic abecedary, the earliest known example of an alphabet written in a fixed order. That ordering is the ancestor of the sequence you still recite.
Be precise about the claim. Ugarit did not produce the first alphabet. It produced the earliest known *ordered* one, and the Baal Cycle, the fullest surviving account of Canaanite myth.
The tablets themselves are dispersed to the Louvre and the National Museum of Damascus. The National Museum of Latakia has been closed since 2011 to protect its collection.
Condition notes are given for each site, including where something was destroyed or is closed. They are the point of this page.
A Bronze Age port city with a royal palace, archives, and the tablets that carried the alphabet.
Ruins, excavated since 1929. Last independently verified condition assessment was satellite imagery from 2011 and 2014, which found the tell largely intact.
Black volcanic sand under the slopes of Jebel Aqra, near the Turkish border.
Open as a landscape; pre-war chalet and resort development was extensive.
The mountain that stands behind the whole region, and that the Ugaritic texts treat as the seat of Baal.
Accessible as a landscape feature.
Mountain villages above the coast — pine, orchard and cooler air than the shore.
Both saw fighting and displacement during the war, Kassab notably in 2014. Mentioned as places with a recent history, not as scenery.
Ugarit’s condition has not been independently verified since 2014 satellite imagery. That gap is stated rather than filled in.
As of September 2026 the US State Department (Level 4) and UK FCDO (advice updated 2 September 2026) maintain country-wide advisories with no coastal carve-out.
Grilled fish, olive oil and citrus from the groves behind the coast — and mate, drunk here in quantity, a habit brought home by returning emigrants from South America.
