The whole register

A clay tablet from Ugarit carrying the letters in order — the oldest known alphabet sequence, and the reason we know the order is that old.

Scratched signs at Serabit el-Khadim take Egyptian pictures and use them for sounds, which is the whole idea in embryo.

The Byblos inscription whose Phoenician letters are recognisable ancestors of Greek and Latin ones, and the argument about its date.

Hans Bauer, Édouard Dhorme and Charles Virolleaud worked out Ugaritic cuneiform within about a year of its discovery.

Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, a palace archive of tablets, and a city that ended abruptly around 1200 BC.

Continuously occupied for most of recorded history, and the source of the Greek word for book.

Two harbours, a dye industry and a colonising reach that ran to the western Mediterranean.

A mound made of its own previous cities, and why stratigraphy reads as a calendar.

Hexaplex trunculus and Bolinus brandaris, a gland the size of a fingernail, and thousands of shells for a few grams of dye.

Crushed murex heaps outside Tyre and Sidon are the industrial waste of the trade.

Sumptuary restriction is why the colour means what it means.

Core-formed and cast glass was slow, thick and precious, which is why so little of it exists.

Appearing on this coast in the first century BC, it made glass fast enough to be ordinary within a generation.

Once it was cheap it travelled, which is why Levantine glass turns up across the empire.

Straight, resinous, rot-resistant and very large — exported to Egypt and Mesopotamia for three thousand years, which is why so little old growth is left.

Nebuchadnezzar II had reliefs cut into the rock recording his timber expedition.

Temple roofs, palace beams and ships — the uses that justified moving it that far.

A Late Bronze Age wreck off the Turkish coast carrying copper and tin ingots, glass, ivory and resin — a single ship's manifest of an entire trade system.

Oxhide copper ingots as a shape that made cargo countable.

Seabed anoxia keeps organic material that a land site would have lost.

Claude Schaeffer began work in 1929 after a farmer's plough hit a tomb roof, and ran the excavation for decades.

Ernest Renan's 1860s survey, an early and very mixed piece of archaeological practice.

The Louvre, the National Museum of Beirut and the National Museum of Damascus: why provenance and division of finds matter to what can be studied now.