Ugarit

UGARIT. - An ancient city of upper Syria, today Rās Samrah, brought to light by French excavations begun in 1929.

Rās Samrah is an artificial mound, about 20 m. high and having an area of about 25 hectares, situated about 12 km. north of Laodicea and 1 km. east of the coast. The chance discoveries of a peasant in the nearby port called Minat al-Bajdā' (1928) attracted the attention of the Archaeological Service of Beirut and then of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, which decided to begin systematic excavations. C. F.-A. Schaeffer was placed in charge of them, assisted by G. Chenet. Eleven campaigns were conducted between 1929 and 1939; after the interruption due to the war, and after test diggings in the years 1948-49, the excavations were resumed in 1950. It was calculated in 1939 that about one eighth of the area had been explored, nor has that proportion been much changed by the new excavations.

At Rās Samrah archaeological strata have been distinguished, which go back to the 2nd-5th millennia B.C. The first (12th-15th centuries) shows a notable prosperity, interrupted toward the middle of the 14th century by a serious fire; the city must therefore have recovered, only to decline definitively at the beginning of the Iron Age under the action of the "peoples of the sea." The second stratum (16th-21st centuries) indicates the predominance of the Semitic element: the temples of Ba'al and of Dagon and numerous vessels of Canaanite type belong to this period; Egyptian and Cretan influences are not lacking, and traces of the passage of the Hyksos remain. In the third stratum (about the 3rd millennium) Canaanite pottery is still found, which indicates the presence of the Semites in the area already from that period. The fourth stratum (about the 4th millennium) is characterized by an elegant pottery, sometimes in two or three colors, which closely recalls that of Mesopotamia. Finally in the fifth stratum (about the 5th millennium) painted pottery ceases and a much more archaic one is found.

The identification of modern Rās Samrah with ancient U. was neither immediate nor easy. Mentions of U. had already been found in Egyptian, Hittite and Akkadian texts. After various hypotheses, the localization of U. at Rās Samrah was proposed by W. F. Albright in 1931 and then confirmed by a series of elements: the repeated discovery of the name U. in the texts of Rās Samrah; the discovery in 1933 of a colophon in which was mentioned an Nqmd mle Ugrt ("Nqmd king of U."); finally a letter in Akkadian found in 1934 and written to a recipient of the city, in which it is said: "May the gods of U. protect you, my brother!"

Alongside the archaeological discoveries, which show in U. a great cosmopolitan city, exposed to influences many and of composite culture, important are the discoveries of texts, which immediately accompanied the excavation campaigns. Egyptian, Hittite, Hurrian, and especially Sumerian and Akkadian documents have been found. But what above all aroused the interest of researchers was the discovery of many hundreds of clay tablets, covered with a cuneiform script of the Mesopotamian type, but different in the shape of the signs and in their number, which barely reached about thirty. C. Viroleaud, H. Bauer and E. Dhorme worked separately on the decipherment. The number of signs immediately suggested that it was an alphabetic script; the fact that the individual words (separated from one another by small vertical strokes) had on average 3-4 signs each indicated that it must be a language of the Semitic group, in which precisely such is the average number of consonants per word: this, moreover, was confirmed by the region in which the texts had been found. Through a successive series of hypotheses, in which the priority among the researchers is not always ascertainable, already in 1930 the script of U. was deciphered.

The language of the texts of U. presents many characteristics in common with the northwestern group of the Semitic languages, to which it also belongs geographically, and in particular with Canaanite. However, just as the definition and limits of Canaanite are controversial, so Ugaritic has some autonomous and divergent elements. In the first place, it presents a phonetic system better specified and more conservative of the Proto-Semitic sounds: indeed there are found in it the dentals t and t (> t) and the gutturals g and h, lost in the rest of the Canaanite area. Still in phonetics, it departs from Canaanite in the passage d > d (common to Aramaic) instead of d > z and in the absence of the characteristic phenomenon d > b. The vocalism is the same as Proto-Semitic: a, i, u; and it is a peculiarity of the script to use three signs for the consonant: depending on the vowel that accompanies it. The morphology shows the persistence of the ancient Semitic endings for the cases; in the verb, the imperfect preserves alongside the indicative the subjunctive, jussive and energetic moods.

The Ugaritic texts, whose period of composition is around the 15th-14th century B.C., contain economic and diplomatic writings, hymns, prayers, and finally a series of mythological poems, which constitute the part of greatest importance for the reconstruction of the beliefs and customs not only of the city, but, as far as one may suppose, also of much of the Canaanite milieu. The most important cycle is that of the god Ba'al, of whom is narrated the struggle and victory over the god of the sea Yam and the construction of a great palace; Ba'al is killed by Môt, god of the underworld, and dragged by him into his kingdom, but then brought back to life and led back to earth by his sister 'Anat, who in turn kills Môt: the cycle, which presents itself as a series of different episodes, reflects in all probability a seasonal myth, in which Ba'al represents spring fertility and Môt the summer aridity that destroys it, but is then in turn defeated. Another poem concerns the hero Aqhat, son of the wise Danel, who for having refused the goddess 'Anat his hunter's bow incurs her wrath and is killed; the sister Paghat sets out to avenge him and it is possible that the end of the poem, preserved in a fragmentary state, contains the resurrection of the hero. The poem of Keret probably has some historical basis, a king who has lost his entire family and who, advised in a dream by the god El, undertakes an expedition into the land of Udum, defeats its king and marries his daughter, by whom he will have new offspring. The poem of the Dawn and the Sunset is considered a little book of religious drama, which sets out in the first part the ritual acts and the accompanying songs of a cult ceremony connected with the grape harvest, while in the second it narrates the birth from El of two divinities, called precisely Dawn and Sunset.

The interpretation of the Ugaritic texts is not yet entirely clear; it is to be hoped that the coming years will bring, with the extension of the discoveries, a parallel progress in the knowledge of this important center of the ancient Near East. - See pl. LXIX.

Sabatino Moscati