Ugarit

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In the spring of 1928 a farmer working the coastal plain north of Latakia drove his plough into a stone slab and broke through the roof of a vaulted tomb. The grave goods that came up from it — Mycenaean pottery, Egyptian alabaster, faience — were of a kind no village in Ottoman-successor Syria should have produced, and the report traveled up through the antiquities service to Paris. A year later a French campaign opened the low mound eight hundred meters inland, at a place the local Arabic called Ras Shamra, the cape of fennel. Under the fennel lay a city that had been ash since the twelfth century BCE: Ugarit, capital of a kingdom that had brokered the trade and diplomacy of the eastern Mediterranean for three hundred years and then vanished so completely that its own name had to be relearned from the tablets buried in its ruin.

A kingdom on the seam

Ugarit sat where it had to sit. The harbor at Minet el-Beida — the White Harbor, a curve of pale shell-sand — gave shelter to ships working the run between the Nile and the Aegean; behind it the coastal kingdom ran inland to the watershed of the Jebel Ansariyah, with the snow-cone of Mount Sapanu (modern Jebel al-Aqra) marking its northern horizon. The position was a seam in the political map of the Late Bronze Age. To the south and west lay the sphere of Egypt; to the north and east, beyond the Amanus passes, the Hittite Empire ruling Anatolia from Hattusa; eastward across the Orontes ran the roads to inland Syria and on to Mesopotamia. Goods moving by sea or by caravan between these worlds passed through Ugarit, and the kingdom grew rich on the passage of other people’s cargo: Cypriot copper landed at the harbor, tin came overland from the east, and the two were alloyed into the bronze that named the age. The export ledgers name dyed wool, linen, oil, timber from the cedar slopes, worked metal, and the purple-dyed cloth the Aegeans prized. Merchant houses such as those of Yabninu and Urtenu ran their own fleets and their own correspondence across Cyprus, the Aegean, Anatolia, Egypt, and Assyria; the kingdom’s wealth lay less in conquest than in standing astride a crossing.

The texture of that commerce is legible because the men who ran it kept their letters. Cargo manifests and accounts list copper ingots by weight, jars of oil and wine, baled wool and finished garments, and the shipments of grain that fed the inland courts in lean years. Ships are chartered, debts called in, ransoms negotiated for sailors taken at sea; harbor dues are assessed; a merchant complains of a consignment lost to bad faith or bad weather. The kingdom’s prosperity was an artifact of the whole system around it — Cyprus close offshore with its copper, the Aegean palaces buying eastern luxuries, Egypt and Hatti underwriting the peace within which a cargo could cross from one to the other. Ugarit took its cut of every passage and converted it into a court that corresponded with kings.

That position also fixed Ugarit’s politics, which were the politics of a small rich state between two empires. For much of the fourteenth century the kings of Ugarit leaned toward Egypt, with whom they exchanged gifts and correspondence in the years of the Amarna diplomacy. The balance broke when Suppiluliuma I of Hatti drove south into Syria in the campaigns that broke the kingdom of Mitanni. King Niqmaddu II (reigning roughly 1350–1315 BCE), reading the wind, came over to the Hittite side; a treaty — its terms preserved in the archives, the original cut on a tablet of metal — bound Ugarit as a vassal, owing tribute and military service in exchange for protection and for a favorable adjustment of its frontiers at the expense of neighbors who had backed the losing coalition. From then Ugarit was a Hittite client, its kings confirmed from Hattusa and supervised through the Hittite viceroy at Carchemish, while keeping its commerce open in every direction. The dynasty ran in a documented line — Niqmaddu II, Arhalba, Niqmepa, Ammittamru II, Ibiranu, Niqmaddu III, and last Ammurapi — its dynastic seal carrying the image of a royal ancestor, its archives recording the marriages, lawsuits, and tribute schedules of a house that styled itself the equal correspondent of greater kings.

The thirty signs

Ugarit’s scribes wrote in whatever the moment required. The chancery handled Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca, in the standard syllabic cuneiform of the day; the archives also yielded Sumerian school texts, Hurrian, Hittite, Egyptian, Cypro-Minoan, and the polyglot lexical lists by which a trainee learned to set one tongue against another. But the kingdom’s own contribution to the history of writing was something else: an alphabet. Some thirteenth- or fourteenth-century mind took the wedge-impressed technique of cuneiform — the only writing the region knew how to make in clay — and married it to the alphabetic principle already stirring in the picture-signs of the Sinai and the Levantine coast, producing a script of around thirty signs, each standing for a single consonant (with three signs marking the quality of a following vowel after the glottal stop), pressed into clay with a stylus and read from left to right.

What makes the find decisive is not the script alone but the order. Among the tablets is an abecedary — a small practice tablet, the work of a scribe-in-training, listing the signs one after another in their fixed sequence. That sequence is, recognizably, the order the Western alphabets still keep: the run that yields a, b, g, d, h at the head and survives into Greek alpha-beta-gamma-delta and Latin A-B-C-D. The Ugaritic abecedary is the oldest securely attested alphabet preserved in its own canonical order, set down by a pupil whose name is lost, around three centuries before the Phoenician alphabet that would carry the principle out to the Mediterranean world. (The relationship of that later Phoenician linear alphabet to the Ugaritic cuneiform one is collateral, not lineal: both descend from the same early Canaanite picture-signs, and Ugarit’s wedge-form alphabet died with the city, while the linear branch lived on.)

The decipherment was swift and competitive. When Charles Virolleaud published the first specimens in 1929, no one could read them; within roughly two years three scholars working independently — Hans Bauer in Halle, Édouard Dhorme in Jerusalem, and Virolleaud himself in Paris — had cracked the script, each contributing pieces, the alphabet falling open faster than almost any ancient writing system before or since. By 1931 Virolleaud was publishing the first of the mythological tablets, and a previously unsuspected literature in a previously unread language entered the world.

What the houses held

The texts did not lie in a single great library but in a scatter of archives, each lodged in the building whose business it served. The Royal Palace — a sprawl of some ninety rooms around a half-dozen courtyards, with gardens, a stone-lined pool, and its own kiln for baking documents — held the diplomatic and administrative correspondence of the crown, divided among an eastern, western, southern, and central archive by the kind of paperwork each handled: treaties and royal letters in one quarter, land-grants and tax rolls in another. Lesser archives sat in the houses of named men: a high priest’s library on the acropolis between the two great temples of Baal and Dagan; the house of a scholar-priest whose shelves held the literary and ritual tablets; and, excavated only from 1973 after a modern military trench cut into it, the house of Urtenu, a merchant and royal official whose six hundred and fifty tablets — the largest archive found after the palace itself — document the kingdom’s last decades from prosperity into crisis. Across the site the count runs to thousands of tablets, in the several languages and the two scripts, the largest cuneiform archive recovered from any second-millennium Levantine state. The find conditions matter as much as the count: because the documents stayed where they had been filed, in the rooms and houses that used them, each archive can be read as a coherent body of business rather than as a curated collection, and the social anatomy of the kingdom — crown, temple, and merchant house — comes up out of the ground intact.

Among the Ugaritic-language tablets are the documents that made the city famous beyond the study of trade and diplomacy: the six-tablet Baal Cycle, the epics of the kings Kirta and Aqhat, sacrificial calendars, omen compendia and clay liver-models for divination, and a funerary liturgy that summons the deified royal dead by name. The colophons preserve the rarest of Bronze Age data — the name of an author. A scribe called Ilimilku, working under King Niqmaddu, signs the copying of the great mythological tablets, attaching to a body of poetry the single human hand that set it in clay. The world those texts open — the storm-god Baal and his combats with Sea and Death, the aged father El and the warrior Anat, the goddess Astarte, the dying-and-returning pattern that gives the southern Adonis a Bronze Age relative, the cult of the rephaim and its bearing on the Hebrew scriptures — is the proper subject of Ugaritic and West Semitic religion. What concerns the city as a polity is narrower and just as remarkable: that a coastal kingdom could translate its gods, its laws, and its accounts across the borders of half a dozen languages, and keep the records to prove it.

The world of letters

Ugarit’s archives are a window onto the diplomatic order of the Late Bronze Age, the system of vassalage, gift-exchange, and dynastic marriage that bound the great kingdoms of Egypt, Hatti, Babylon, Assyria, and the lesser thrones beneath them into a single correspondence. The kings of Ugarit wrote to the storm-god’s own land in the Hittite north and to the pharaohs in the south; their letters bargain over runaway servants, disputed cargoes, ship requisitions, and the price of grain. Ugarit’s neighbors and trading partners appear by name across the tablets: the Hurrian-influenced kingdoms of inland Syria, the Amorite courts whose own archives at Alalakh on the Amuq plain and at Qatna in the interior parallel Ugarit’s own, the older cultic and scribal traditions of Sumer and Babylonian Mesopotamia that the schoolroom carried west. Ugarit was the western terminus of that long literate culture, the place where the cuneiform world met the sea — and where, in the alphabet, it produced something the cuneiform world had not.

The recovery and its scholarship

Almost everything known of Ugarit has been recovered inside a single century, and the recovery is still in progress. Claude Schaeffer, who had directed the work from the first French campaign of 1929, returned to Ras Shamra season after season into the 1970s; the excavation he began has continued under French-Syrian direction down to the upheavals of the present, and major archives — the house of Urtenu among them — were still surfacing in the 1970s. The standard archaeological synthesis of the site itself is Marguerite Yon’s The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Eisenbrauns, 2006), which maps the palace, the temples, the harbor quarter, and the residential blocks against half a century of field reports. The scholarly apparatus for the texts is correspondingly young: the pioneering transcriptions of the 1930s have been revised so thoroughly that no edition before the 1960s can be cited for fine philological detail, and the order of the Baal Cycle’s opening tablets has since been reversed.

The reference editions belong to the last two generations. The alphabetic corpus is cited from the Dietrich–Loretz–Sanmartín edition (the sigla KTU/CAT), which fixes the numbering by which every tablet is now known. The ritual and divinatory texts — the sacrificial calendars, the omen tablets, the funerary liturgy for the royal dead — are gathered and translated in Dennis Pardee’s Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (Society of Biblical Literature, 2002), which the publisher has made freely available in full. The grammar and the wider field are surveyed in the Handbook of Ugaritic Studies edited by Wilfred Watson and Nicolas Wyatt (Brill, 1999), the standard one-volume orientation to language, texts, archaeology, and history. A clean, openly licensed transliteration of the poetic and ritual corpus, useful to anyone reading the tablets directly, is maintained by the Göttingen Ugarit-Portal. The constraint on freely reusable editions is an accident of copyright timing — most of the foundational philology was done by scholars who died after the mid-1950s, so the editions clear the public domain only over the coming decades — but it does not touch the substance, which is secure: a Bronze Age kingdom read in its own multiple hands.

The hunger years and the fire

The end is documented from inside it. Through the last decades of the thirteenth century and into the early twelfth, the tone of the correspondence darkens. The empires that guaranteed the trading order were straining; harvests failed; the sea grew dangerous. Letters from the Hittite court demand that Ugarit send grain by ship, urgently, to relieve famine in the north — a matter, one writer says, of life and death. Other letters speak of enemy ships sighted off the coast, of towns burned, of forces requisitioned and not returned. In the last of them King Ammurapi answers a plea for help with a confession of his own helplessness: his own troops are away in Hatti, his own ships are away off Lycia, and his land lies open. Seven enemy ships, he reports, have already done great harm.

The blow fell around 1190–1185 BCE, in the general unraveling that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean — the convulsion the Egyptian records blame on a coalition of seaborne peoples, and that modern study reads as a cascade of failures, drought, severed trade, and movement of populations, in which Ugarit was one of many kingdoms that simply stopped. The city burned and was never rebuilt; the harbor silted; the name passed out of memory. But the fire that killed Ugarit is the reason Ugarit can be read. The tablets were unbaked clay, the soft record of a working bureaucracy; fire turned them to ceramic. The last letters were caught in the act of being written and sent — some, by report, still in the kiln or the ovens, fired by the same conflagration that ended the hands that wrote them. A kingdom that left its archives in damp clay would have dissolved into the mound with the timber and the grain. Ugarit instead left a library hardened by its own destruction, and so the city that ended most abruptly is among the most completely heard.

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