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Title: The Lost City of Ugarit
Source:
Words and Pictures Magazine,
URL Source: http://www.shunya.net/Text/Ugarit/Ugarit.htm
Published: Apr 24, 2005
Author: Shunya.
Post Date: 2005-04-24 19:32:30 by tom007
Keywords: Ugarit, Lost, City
Views: 100
Comments: 8
The Lost City of Ugarit The Birthplace of the Alphabet, Syria The road to Lattakia goes over the Anti-Lebanon Range. I had left Aleppo under a blue sky at noon; now a thick fog rolls in, tall conifers appear in the valleys, visibility drops. The pop Arabic music in the bus gets louder but does not deter my fellow passengers from dozing. Handsome villages with brick houses, clean streets and small domed mosques appear now and again. We stop at a rest area with gift shops and restaurants and arrive in Lattakia by early evening. I take a cab to the city center and find a hotel. It is my tenth day in Syria. Lattakia lies on the Mediterranean coast and is one of Syria's most modern towns. I am astonished by its women at once; they're well groomed and flaunt their feminine charms in tight jeans, sleek leather coats, flowing dark hair, makeup, décolleté. It feels like Palermo. The evening prayer from a mosque comes wafting down rooftops just in time to remind me: I am in an Islamic country. Evidently its socialistic aims run counter to those of radical Islam, virtually absent in Syria. Curiosity earlier made me ask a few urban young men: which Arab country has the hottest women? The winner: Lebanon, Syria next, and tied for third spot: Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait. I imagine local young women waging a million mutinies daily – in dress, movement, occupation, choice of mates. Each new threshold crossed a potential source of angst and family drama. A delicate web of connections, customs, certitudes, all subject to modernizing change. Restaurants for stylish people have names like Stop 5 and Last Station – Sadé singing of sorrow in one, the feisty Guantanamera in the other. Wine goblets over bars, waiters speak English, I see women smoking inside; still-life art adorns the walls. In San Francisco, I avoid such places but here, ironically, their presence is encouraging. Hunger draws me in; I notice 'sheep testis – 200 grams, with potato' but don’t have the balls to try it. I order a kebab halabi with salad, hummous, bread, and wash it down with Arak and cola. I amble back through a mist like drizzle, satiated. Kebabs in Syria are sublime. The hotel receptionist intercepts me and insists on serving me tea in the lounge. Free, he clarifies. His boredom must drive him to engage this ajnabi, foreigner. Behind his counter are pictures of Hafez al-Assad – Lattakia was his hometown. In Syria his images are everywhere: jovial Hafez, thoughtful Hafez, Hafez with happy peasants, Hafez looking tough in dark glasses. A giant gold-colored statue of the man stands right outside the hotel. I ask how his son Bashar is working out. A London-trained ophthalmologist, Bashar was hastily summoned to replace his brother and heir apparent Bassel, after his accidental death in 1994. When his father died in mid-2000, the parliament voted to lower the minimum age for Presidency from 40 to 34 (his age). ‘New way,’ the receptionist says, waving his hand, ‘Bashar, good man, good mind.’ He laughs, then says with a wink, ‘no more.’ I am to understand that further discussions on Bashar in this public spot are undesirable. The walls apparently have ears in Syria. When Bashar took over, he insisted that people not bother with his pictures. But the people didn't listen – a testimony of their affection for father and son? I ask the receptionist and, like other Syrians I've asked, he says, ‘we love them.’ But a Palestinian man in Aleppo told me: the pictures are for the Mukhabarat (Syrian secret police) – they suggest a state-fearing, law-abiding establishment, a minimal insurance policy in a police state. But now that everyone does it, I wonder about its efficacy. If you play by the rules, the receptionist says, the Mukhabarat will leave you alone. Otherwise, one might disappear overnight with nary a trace, especially during papa al-Assad's time. Over the years, a dissenting minority, including Islamic radicals from the Muslim Brotherhood, suffered. But the common majority accepted papa al-Assad (propaganda helped too), and which alone explains the genuine outpouring of grief at his death. What they embraced are in fact the stock qualities of traditional monarchy: authority, stability, continuity. Not only a fixture, he became a veritable father figure. Papa al-Assad's socialist dictatorship did produce social order, negligible crime, relative freedom for women, a gentle Islam, low economic disparity, no abject poverty, public health services, highways, bridges, electricity, clean water, etc. But there was also a dark side: repression of intellectuals and dissenters, little freedom of press or speech, a climate of surveillance and suspicion, the related ills of corruption and nepotism. Bashar is no liberal democrat but in the majority view he favors more civil freedoms, gradual economic reform, and IT. I'm inclined to see him as a Syrian flavor of Rajiv Gandhi; his father I see as an amalgam of Nehru and Stalin. Like most other non-Western countries, Syrian society is responding to the stronger cultural, economic and political currents of Western modernity (as defined by individualism, competition and democracy). That these currents are not largely indigenous raises awkward questions. In a New York Review of Books article on Naguib Mahfouz, JM Coetzee wrote, ‘In the century and a half that followed Napoleon, Islamic countries took on a range of Western concepts and institutions identified by them as essential to their modernization. Much of the unsettledness of the region today issues from a failure to fully absorb and domesticate such essentially secular Western concepts as democracy, liberalism, and socialism. The question the region faces is: Can a culture become modern without internalizing the genealogy of modernity, that is, without living through the epistemological revolution, in all its implications, out of which Western scientific knowledge grew? "The new outlook [in the Islamic world] is modern in a way, but it is a mutilated outlook," writes Daryush Shayegan. Modernity has been absorbed, but only in a "truncated" way. Internally the Islamic world is still "trailing behind modernity."’ The receptionist is curious about me: my home, job, motivation for visit. In Syria, I lie and say that I live and work in Bombay. It at once distances me from American politicking in this region. I also wish to know what the locals make of an Indian. I find charming the idea of a traveler from an ancient land in another; I've even practiced saying this Bogart style: Who, me? Ah, I'm from al-Hind. As I’ve discovered, al-Hind is a welcome association in Syria, not the least of it due to Bollywood. Inside the gates of Damascus, an elderly man who spoke no English animatedly tried to convey his regard for Gandhi. But for most others, sharing a city with Amitabh Bachchan is no mean feat. Cabdrivers and waiters rattle out names; I nod appreciatively and try to hide my amusement and shame. § I am in the Levant to visit a few archaeological sites, or what I prefer to call ‘lost cities’, to see some of the desert landscape, and to learn something of present day Syria and Jordan. As a kid, when I first came across the term ‘lost cities,’ I was mesmerized. A whole city lost? Lost? I’ve seen many lost cities since then but have lost none of my fascination for them. I am in Lattakia to visit another – the nearby ruins of Ugarit, the 2nd millennium BCE city credited with the first and only invention of the alphabet. The earliest evidence of writing itself dates back to 3500 BCE in Uruk, Mesopotamia, modern south Iraq (discounting 'writing' like cave etchings, the oldest dating to 15,000-13,000 BCE). Many call it the most valuable invention for human progress. Writing was not an isolated invention but related to the changing pattern of life of the period. The first cities were coming into being, agricultural production, landholding and trade were becoming more complex. Records of various transactions had to be kept. All early writing systems (e.g., Mesopotamian Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Chinese Pictographs) employed a unique symbol for a word or syllable, i.e., they were logo-syllabic systems. Two or more symbols were combined to express complex thoughts. 1 The problem was that the list of symbols and combinations soon grew very large, and without a logical scheme. This blocked the spread of writing and its complexity therefore restricted it to specialists – a professional class of scribes who gained enormous power and prestige. Their long training and vested interests further impeded simplifications in writing. Here is a sample of what an Egyptian scribe thought of his profession: ‘Behold, there is nothing better than writings! I can see no calling comparable. (The office of scribe) is greater than any calling. There is nothing like it on earth.’ ‘The major changes came from peoples who enjoyed a degree of Mesopotamian or Egyptian contacts which made them aware of the advantages of writing, but who were not sufficiently integrated into those cultures to have the benefit of scribes trained in either the Mesopotamian or the Egyptian writing system. These conditions applied above all to Palestine, parts of Syria and Crete. It was the peoples of these areas who in the second millennium were driven to produce forms of writing simpler than the old logo-syllabic systems.’ 2 The people of Ugarit were the Canaanites, precursors to the Phoenicians. They were perhaps the first to recognize that human speech consists of only a finite number of atomic sounds and all that was really needed was a symbol for each. They devised 30 symbols from which the alphabets of all phonetic languages are derived (yes all: Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, etc.). As a result, writing opened up and scribal power reduced; any child (or foreigner) could now easily learn to read and write. This may sound simple but it took nearly two millennia to arrive at it. In Histories, Herodotus acknowledged that the Greeks got their alphabet from the Phoenicians. The names of most letters in the Greek/Phoenician alphabets are clearly related – alpha/aleph (ox), beta/bet (house), gamma/gimel (camel), delta/dalet (door), etc. Notably, the Ugaritic alphabet only had consonants – the pre-Homeric Greeks added the vowels. Ugarit was an independent kingdom from the 18th century BCE. Its military and economic history has been revealed by the tablets found in the palace archives. The Canaanites had a golden age from about 1450 to 1200 BCE; it produced great royal palaces, temples and shrines, a high priests' library and other libraries on the acropolis. With their strong ships built of the cedars on the mountains of Lebanon, they became the greatest naval power of the age and knew many key principles of navigation. They traded textiles, ivory, weapons and silver with the cities of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Aegean Sea, Egypt and Asia Minor. Akkadian was the international language. Around 1200 BCE, Ugarit likely fell prey to the invasion of Philistines, northern tribes sometimes called the Sea Peoples. But other possibilities like a big earthquake, a famine or a massive fire have not been ruled out. Its population then was likely under 10,000. Ugaritic gods represented forces of nature, each symbolized by an animal, and routinely intervened in the affairs of men. Some of these were: El, the master of the gods, their eldest and wisest, and the creator of the universe. Baal, the son of El, was the god of storms, thunder and rain, land and hills. Asherah, the wife of Baal, was the goddess of love, fertility and war. Dagon was the god of wheat and the plough, particularly honored by the Amorites, a nomadic people from Upper Syria, of whom Hammurabi of Babylon was the most famous king. Other gods included Moot, Anat, Astarte and Kashir. Ritual weeping for the dead was apparently common – the hope being that their grief will someday move the gods to return them to their world. Women were priests as well. Religious worship involved imbibing alcohol and orgiastic sex by priests and worshippers, deemed necessary to convince Baal to send rain, seen as akin to semen – both were life-giving. 3 Texts discovered on site not only ‘constitute a literature of high standing and great originality but also have an important bearing on Old Testament studies ... the patriarchal stories in the Old Testament were not merely transmitted orally but were ... of Canaanite origin ... [this] has led to a new appraisal of the Old Testament.’4 In Ugaritic literature, Yahweh is a son of El; the story of the flood is told. Scores of references to Baal appear in the Old Testament. § The sky next morning is a glorious blue; I set out from the hotel. A shoeshine boy notices my mud-caked shoes and joyfully leaps in the gesture of a high-five. When I merely smile and slink away he is visibly disappointed. I locate a minivan to Ugarit, 16 km north of Lattakia. I get the last remaining seat and we leave. The minivan stops on demand, people hop in and out; soon I am the only passenger left as Ugarit is the last stop on this run. We leave the town behind, traffic peters out; we're now moving along the coast; there are only a few scattered houses, trees in their yards laden with ruby grapefruits. ‘Turkiye?’ the driver asks. ‘Hind! Welcome!’ He drops me near the short unpaved path to the ruins. As he turns around, I notice he has raised the volume on the Umm Kulthum song. I climb a flight of steps and reach a ticket booth. Right ahead, I see the remains of the ancient city on the mound of Ras Shamra (fennel hill). Few tourists come even in the peak season; being on the US roster of terrorist nations doesn't help either. A good many are specialists; in fact, for each visitor to Syria, 20 visit Egypt, 400 visit France. I see none today. Besides, Ugarit competes with other, more (structurally) spectacular archaeological sites in Syria – Palmyra, Afamea, Bosra, Serjilla, etc., even though they are relatively recent, lying closer to us than to Ugarit. To make matters worse, the authors of the LP guide on Syria were "aggrieved" by the admission fee ($6 for foreigners, $1 for locals) to the "badly maintained" site of Ugarit, and wondered what they had paid for. Cheapskates, I pronounce, do they fork out extra cash when using state-subsidized services? The result: no hustlers, no tour guides, no one to step in front of the camera. The city entrance is a grotto-like vaulted passageway. It leads to the foundation walls of the royal palace which had an area of 10,000 square meters, ninety rooms around eight courtyards, with a piped water system and drainage. I pass through reception rooms, courtyards, guard rooms, a banquet hall, a royal garden. Many stone walls are over six feet high. The ambassadors hall once had a fountain with fishes, the ground was covered with floorboards. Near the acropolis are the ruins of the temples of Baal and Dagon, and the library of priest Rapanou. It not only had official correspondence but lists of animals and deities, weights and measures, even ways to treat sick horses. Invaluable for philologists is a comparative lexicon of Sumerian, Hurrian, Babylonian and Ugaritic words. A peasant's plow uncovered Ugarit in 1928; the French soon began excavating. Soundings made through the Ras Shamra mound have revealed a sequence of layered settlements since the Neolithic period. The earliest – already a small fortified town in the 7th millennium BCE – shows a pre-pottery stage with flint tools. The next settlement layer includes sun-dried pottery. In early Chalcolithic, or copper-stone, Age, painted pottery appears, then geometric designs; flint tools competed with metal tools made of copper. The Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium) layer yielded various monochromatic burnished wares and some red polished ware. The Middle Bronze Age (2nd millennium) layer reveals high expertise in bronze metallurgy – the visible ruins correspond to this period. A musical piece on a clay tablet, dating to the 14th century BCE, has been excavated on site. Ugarit, in other words, employed musical notation a full thousand years before Pythagoras. It used the Sol-Fa scale and is therefore the real foundation of western music. The piece lasts three minutes and is characterized by rhythm and which, according to a specialist, ‘sounds very familiar to us’. One clay tablet reveals something of the Canaanites' family values: Starting from today I Yaremano give up all my properties to my wife Baydawe and two sons Yataleeno and Yanhamo. If one of my sons treats his mother Baydawe meanly, he must pay five hundred pieces of silver for the king. Beyond that he should take off his shirt, leave it on the door's lock and go into the street. But the one who treats his mother Baydawe with respect and consideration, his mother will give him all the properties. Of the many stories found on clay tablets, one recounts the myth of king Daniel and his son Aqhat who was killed and eaten by eagles. Following this event all plants died. The deed was avenged by his sister Paghat and she perhaps even managed to bring him back to life. Hundreds of tablets still await deciphering due to their poor state. The best known epic of the Canaanites, however, is The Legend of Keret, written c. 1500 BCE. Little is known of king Keret – where he ruled, how or if he was related to the kings reining at the time the epic was composed. His kingdom, or its capital, was called Hubur. Parts of the story are missing but here is an outline: "King Keret's family has been entirely wiped out except for himself. He weeps bitterly over the extinction of his line, but El appears to him in a dream, and Keret begs him to grant him posterity. Thereupon El gives Keret detailed instructions for preparing and conducting a military expedition to Udum and demanding the granddaughter of Udum's king in marriage: the king's name is Pabel, the girl's Hurriya. Keret follows the directions and, as El predicted, Pabel dispatches a delegation to his headquarters to treat for peace. So Keret makes his not unreasonable demand, the messengers retrace their steps, and ... apprise their lord of Keret's terms. [missing tablets] Keret marries the fair maiden and begets a numerous progeny. Then, for reasons which are not quite clear, Hurriya, in Keret's name, gives three successive banquets, apparently to three distinct groups of people. [missing tablets] Keret's children are grown up. Keret himself passes through a severe illness, which causes intense grief to those about him, especially to his son Elhau and his daughter Thitmanet. In the end El himself creates a female being, Sha'taqat, to remove Keret's illness. While the king is convalescing, his eldest son, Yassib, has the impudence to suggest that since he is neglecting his kingly duties he ought to abdicate in Yassib's favor. For this his father roundly curses him. [missing tablets]" 5 What's interesting is the siege of a distant city over a woman, a theme central to both Homer's Iliad and Valmiki's Ramayana. Mystical thought suffuses this verse fragment from The Legend of Keret: Grand the plans of gods and man, But when the day is done – Bones broadly scattered in the sun, For ironic Moira* the fray hath won. And naught remains for Apollo's progeny, But to sing her praise, In comic agony. [* Fate, or the will of the gods] On a clay tablet, someone's anguish is expressed in these evocative words: My brothers swim in blood like crazy men. I ate my stone like bread. And for a drink, I drank my blood. My tears have replaced my food. Another fragment is from a letter to the authorities. In it the writer laments, The poor has become rich. The wise is in despair. Our crops have been stolen. The vineyard is in ruins. And our town has been destroyed. And on one clay tablet this timeless reminder to men written 34 centuries ago, Do not tell your wife where you hide your money. Humans inhabited this site for 7000 years, from the 7th millennium to Roman times. I wander around the desolate ruins, trying to imagine the city at its prime, its street life, homes, people. The breeze has pulled in low clouds, it might rain. The damp earth is overgrown with weeds; worm hills abound, tiny white and yellow wildflowers carpet the floor. I can see the Mediterranean Sea. There are still no tourists; only the bells on a few grazing sheep break the calm. Footnotes: 1. International road signs are an example of modern day pictograms. 2. From Civilization Before Greece and Rome by HWF Saggs, Yale University Press, 1989. 3. From the Handbook of Ugaritic Studies by Wilfred GE Watson (Editor) and Nicolas Wyatt (Editor), Brill Academic Publishers, July 1999. 4. From Encyclopedia Britannica, 1998. 5. From The Legend of King Keret, A Canaanite Epic of the Bronze Age, trans. by HL Ginsberg. Published by the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1946. ,Comments? © 2005 Shunya. All rights reserved. – Nov, 2001 NB: This article was published in Words and Pictures Magazine, Volume I, Issue 1, July 2004.
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#1. To: All, tommythemadartist, red jones, christine, cracy monkey, zipporah, diana, don (#0)
Thought this may be of interest. The Canninites were the Phonecians. Cannanite means "Makers of Purple". Homer called them Phonecians. Their part of the Levant contained the muroch snails, from their fluids, somehow made an impressive purple dye. This dye was used for the Roman Emperor's robe, as well as the curtain that separated the rabble from the Arc of the Covenent, in the Temple.
Thanks for posting this.. very interesting.. Dee you may find this of interest..
I'm a big history buff, and Sumerian text is something I thoroughly enjoy. Their pantheon of deities, as well as their legends and lore are amazing. The story of Gilgamesh is wild, however, their day to day records were also pretty damned amazing.
Thanks, Zip........ And thanks to tom007 for finding it. I was mentioning to Zip the other night that in junior high school all I wanted to be was an archaeologist.....that is all I wanted to read about. And, of course, I loved history. Now....it falls in with my readings in the Bible.
I thought you'd find this interesting.. the info re the language etc.. was particularly interesting to me.
The alphabet info is of interest to me because it has come to light that the peoples back then weren't exactly cave men. The finds they've had at UR show much more advancement than thought earlier. The whole middle eastern area has so many secrets to yield up to enlighten us.
The finds they've had at UR show much more advancement than thought earlier. they'd like us to think so.. I wonder what information was destroyed at the library at Alexandria.. Library of Alexandria discovered
One of the 'problems' I encounter when doing Bible studies goes something like this......I read the name of a tribe or town.....I will grab one of my dictionaries to read about it. In the process of reading that, another word pops up, so it has to be checked to......and another one.......and another. I can get so caught up and lost. I don't consider it wasted time because I am learning more and more......but it sure detracts from what I'm originally reading. I don't dare go to the computer at a time like this.......... LOL
#2. To: tom007, Rowdee (#1)
Thought this may be of interest. The Canninites were the Phonecians. Cannanite means "Makers of Purple". Homer called them Phonecians. Their part of the Levant contained the muroch snails, from their fluids, somehow made an impressive purple dye. This dye was used for the Roman Emperor's robe, as well as the curtain that separated the rabble from the Arc of the Covenent, in the Temple.
#3. To: tom007 (#1)
#4. To: Zipporah, tom007 (#2)
#5. To: rowdee (#4)
#6. To: Zipporah (#5)
#7. To: rowdee (#6)
he alphabet info is of interest to me because it has come to light that the peoples back then weren't exactly cave men.
#8. To: Zipporah (#7)
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