UGARIT

'Ugarit' (modern site 'Ras Shamra' رأس شمرة; meaning "top/head/cape of the wild fennel" in Arabic) was an ancient cosmopolitan port city, sited on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria a few kilometers north of the modern city of Latakia. Ugarit sent tribute to Egypt and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus (called Alashiya), documented in the archives recovered from the site and corroborated by Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery found there. The polity was at its height from ca. 1450 BC until 1200 BC.

Contents

The site

History

Alphabet

Ugaritic literature

Ugarit religion

Kings of Ugarit

See also

External links

Sources

The site

Ugarit's location was forgotten until 1928 when an Alawite peasant accidentally opened an old tomb while plowing a field. The discovered area was the Necropolis of Ugarit. Excavations have since revealed an important city that takes its place alongside Ur and Eridu as a cradle of urban culture, with a prehistory reaching back to c. 6000 BC, perhaps because it was both a port and at the entrance of the inland trade route to the Euphrates and Tigris lands.
Most excavations of Ugarit were undertaken under extreme political conditions by archaeologist Claude Schaeffer from the Prehistoric and Gallo-Roman Museum of Strasbourg.
The excavations uncovered a royal palace of 90 rooms laid out around eight enclosed courtyards, many ambitious private dwellings, including two private libraries (one belonging to a diplomat named Rapanu) that contained diplomatic, legal, economic, administrative, scholastic, literary and religious texts. Crowning the hill where the city was built were two main temples: one to Baal the "king", son of El, and one to Dagon, the chthonic god of fertility and wheat.
On excavation of the site, several deposits of cuneiform clay tablets were found, constituting a palace library, a temple library and -- apparently unique in the world at the time -- two private libraries; all dating from the last phase of Ugarit, around 1200 BC. The tablets found at this cosmopolitan center are written in four languages: Sumerian, Hurrian, Akkadian (the language of diplomacy in the ancient Near East), and Ugaritic (of which nothing had been known before). No less than seven different scripts were in use at Ugarit: Egyptian and Luwian hieroglyphics, and Cypro-Minoan, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Ugaritic cuneiform.
During excavations in 1958, yet another library of tablets was uncovered. These were, however, sold on the black market and not immediately recovered. The "Claremont Ras Shamra Tablets" are now housed at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California. They were edited by Loren R. Fisher in 1971. In 1973, an archive containing around 120 tablets was discovered during rescue excavations; in 1994 more than 300 further tablets were discovered on this site in a large ashlar building, covering the final years of the Bronze Age city's existence.
The most important piece of literature recovered from Ugarit is arguably the Baal cycle, describing the basis for the religion and cult of the Canaanite Baal.

History

Though the site is thought to have been inhabited earlier, Neolithic Ugarit was already important enough to be fortified with a wall early on, perhaps by 6000 BC.
The first written evidence mentioning the city comes from the nearby city of Ebla, c. 1800 BC. Ugarit passed into the sphere of influence of Egypt, which deeply influenced its art. The earliest Ugaritic contact with Egypt (and the first exact dating of Ugaritic civilization) comes from a carnelian bead identified with the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret I, 1971 BCE–1926 BC. A stela and a statuette from the Egyptian pharaohs Senusret III and Amenemhet III have also been found. However, it is unclear at what time these monuments got to Ugarit. Amarna letters Ugarit of 1350 BC records one letter each from Ammittamru I, Niqmaddu II, and his queen.

Later Ugarit fell under the control of new tribes related to the Hyksos, who mutilated the Egyptian-style monuments. During its high culture, from the 16th to the 13th century BC, Ugarit remained in constant touch with Egypt and Cyprus (named Alashiya).
The last Bronze Age king of Ugarit, 'Amurapi, was a contemporary of the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II. The exact dates of his reign are unknown.
Ugarit was destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age. The destruction levels contained Late Helladic IIIB ware, but no LH IIIC (see Mycenaean period). Therefore, the date of the destruction is important for the dating of the LH IIIC phase. As an Egyptian sword bearing the name of pharaoh Merneptah was found in the destruction levels, 1190 BC was taken as the date for the beginning of the LH IIIC. A cuneiform tablet found in 1986 AD shows that Ugarit was destroyed after the death of Merneptah, that is, before 1190 BC, probably in 1195 BC. It is generally agreed that Ugarit had already been destroyed in the 8th year of Ramesses III.
Whether Ugarit was destroyed before or after Hattusa, the Hittite capital, is debated. The destruction is followed by a settlement hiatus. Many other Mediterranean cultures were deeply disordered just at the same time, apparently by invasions of the mysterious "Sea Peoples".

Alphabet

Scribes in Ugarit appear to have originated the Ugaritic alphabet around 1400 BC; 30 letters, corresponding to sounds, were adapted from cuneiform characters and inscribed on clay tablets (but cf. Byblos). A debate exists as to whether the Phoenician or Ugaritic alphabet was first. While many of the letters show little or no formal similarity, the standard letter order (preserved in our own alphabet as A, B, C, D, etc.) shows strong similarities between the two, suggesting that the Phoenician and Ugaritic systems were not wholly independent inventions. It was later the Phoenician alphabet (which is more properly termed an abjad, as it only had letters representing consonants and not vowels) that spread through the Aegean and on Phoenician trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. The Phoenician system became the basis for the first true alphabet, when it was adopted by Greek speakers who modified some of its signs to represent vowel sounds as well, and as such is the ancestor of our own alphabet (having been in turn adopted and modified by populations in Italy, including ancestors of the Romans). Compared with the difficulty of writing Akkadian in cuneiform—such as the Amarna Letters, from ca. 1350 BC— the flexibility of an alphabet opened a horizon of literacy to many more kinds of people. In contrast, the syllabary (called Linear B) used in Mycenaean Greek palace sites at about the same time was so cumbersome that literacy was limited largely to administrative specialists.

Ugaritic literature

Apart from royal correspondence to neighbouring Bronze Age monarchs, Ugaritic literature from tablets found in the libraries include mythological texts written in a narrative poetry, letters, legal documents such as land transfers, a few international treaties, and a number of administrative lists. Fragments of several poetic works have been identified: the "Legend of Kirtu," the "Legend of Dan-el" the Ba'al tales that detail Baal-Hadad's conflicts with Yam and Mot, and other fragments.
The discovery of the Ugaritic archives has been of great significance to biblical scholarship, as these archives for the first time provided a detailed description of Canaanite religious beliefs during the period directly preceding the Israelite settlement. These texts show significant parallels to Biblical Hebrew literature, particularly in the areas of divine imagery and poetic form. Ugaritic poetry has many elements later found in Hebrew poetry: parallelisms, meters, and rhythms. The discoveries at Ugarit have led to a new appraisal of the Old Testament as literature.

Ugarit religion

Main articles: Ancient Semitic religion

Ugaritic religion centered on the chief god, Ilu or El, the "father of mankind", "the creator of the creation". The Court of El or Ilu was referred to as the 'lhm or Elohim. The most important of the great gods was Hadad, the king of Heaven, Athirat or Asherah (familiar to readers of the Bible), Yam (Sea, the god of the primordial chaos, tempests, and mass-destruction) and Mot (Death). Other gods worshipped at Ugarit were Dagon (Grain), Tirosch, Horon, Resheph (Healing), the craftsman Kothar-and-Khasis (Skilled and Clever), Shahar (Dawn), and Shalim (Dusk). Ugaritic texts have provided scholars with a wealth of material on the religion of the Canaanites and its connections with that of the Israelites.

Kings of Ugarit

★ Niqmaddu I c.1850 BC

★ Yaqurum I c.1825 BC

★ Ibiranu I fl.1600s BC

★ Ammittamru I pre-1349 BC

★ Niqmaddu II 1349-1315 BC

★ Arhalba 1315-1313 BC

★ Niqmepa 1313-1260 BC

★ Ammittamru II 1260-1235 BC

★ Ibiranu II 1235-1220 BC

★ Niqmaddu III 1220-1215 BC

★ Ammurapi 1215-1185 BC

★ Yaqurum II fl.1180s BC?

See also

★ Ugaritic language

★ Ugaritic alphabet

★ Ebla

★ Elohim (gods)

External links

★ Online text: ''The Epic of Ba'al''

★ Ugarit reading list, Drs Stuckenbruck and Weeks, University of Durham

★ The Edinburgh Ras Shamra project includes an introduction to the discovery of Ugarit.

★ Ugarit and the Bible

★ Ugaritic Literature as an Aid to Understanding the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)

★ About the discovery of Ugarit

★ Ugaritic culture, cult and art briefly outlined.

★ Introduction to Ras Shamra (Ugarit), and a virtual museum of Ugaritic art.

★ Brief description of the site of Ugarit.

★ Resources on Biblical Archaeology

★ Canaanite/Ugaritic Mythology

★ Ugarit and Biblical Heritage - A site with descriptions of the primary and minor gods and generous excerpts from the actual stories.

★ Brief history of Ugarit.

★ Ugaritic texts and their relationship to the Old Testament.

Sources

★ Bourdreuil, P. 1991. "Une bibliothèque au sud de la ville : Les textes de la 34e campagne (1973)". in ''Ras Shamra-Ougarit,'' 7 (Paris).

★ Drews, Robert. 1995. ''The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 BC'' (Princeton University Press). ISBN 0-691-02591-6

★ Meletinskii, E. M., 2000 The Poetics of Myth

★ Smith, Mark S., 2001. ''Untold Stories ; The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth Century ISBN 1-56563-575-2 Chapter 1: "Beginnings: 1928–1945"

★ Sanford Holst. "Phoenicians: Lebanon's Epic Heritage," Cambridge and Boston Press, Los Angeles, 2005.

★ Ugarit Forschungen (Neukirchen-Vluyn). UF-11 (1979) honors Claude Schaeffer, with about 100 articles in 900 pages. pp 95, ff, "Comparative Graphemic Analysis of Old Babylonian and Western Akkadian", ( i.e. Ugarit and Amarna (letters), 3 others, Mari, OB,Royal, OB,non-Royal letters). See above, in text.

★ Virolleaud, Charles, 1929. "Les Inscriptions cunéiformes de Ras Shamra." in ''Syria'' 10, pp 304-310.

★ Yon, Marguerite, 2005. ''The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra'' ISBN 1-57506-029-9 (Translation of ''La cité d'Ugarit sur le Tell de Ras Shamra'' 1979)