One of the more recently discovered tablets is a trilingual lexical list written in the thirteenth century BCE for the use of the multilingual population living in Ugarit. Only half of it has been preserved. It belonged to a series of tablets whose pieces were discovered during the first campaigns. They contain a multilingual version of the vocabulary series, designed for the education of scribes. The tablet is divided into six columns, each of which is divided into three subcolumns. About one hundred preserved words are listed there in three languages. Sumerian, already a dead language for several centuries, was the language of scholarship, while Akkadian was that of diplomacy. The third language, Hurrian, was spoken by a sector of the population that could be found in numerous centers of the Near East during the second millennium BCE. The Hurrian people and their language belonged neither to the Semitic world (as did Akkadian), nor to the Indo-European milieu (as did Hittite). This new document makes an important contribution to the interpretation of the poorly understood Hurrian language.
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