The purpose of the Ugaritic Font Initiative (UFI) is to produce a pair of new Unicode fonts for representing Ugaritic cuneiform. Current fonts that cover the Ugaritic Unicode block are insufficient in a number of ways. Most use a style known in the field of Assyriology that is foreign to Ugaritic studies, and all suffer from inaccuracies in the appearance of several characters.
UFI's new font is based on primary evidence from Ugaritic tablets and real-world replication of Ugaritic cuneiform using stylus and clay. The font will provide authors and publishers with the ability to refer to the language and literature of Ugaritic using the actual script in which these were written.
The project is directed by John Screnock, Research Fellow in Hebrew Bible at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with BanglaTypeFoundry and Jacob Thomas. UFI is supported by a grant from the John Fell OUP Research Fund.
