A Primer on Ugaritic: Language, Culture, and Literature - enenuru

Ancient Ugarit 15
at the battle of Kadesh (ca. 1276 BCE). Ugarit still managed to
maintain friendly relations with Egypt. One stele, for example,
recounts that an Egyptian royal scribe was assigned to the royal
court at Ugarit. Ugarit apparently served as a buffer state between
Egypt and Mesopotamia during this period, and it prospered as a
neutral port and conduit of international trade. A letter from the
King of Tyre to the King of Ugarit, for example, illustrates both the
potential wealth and perils of the flourishing maritime trade of this
period (see KTU 2.38; exercise §3.9).
The final destruction of Ugarit usually is attributed to the Sea
Peoples in the early twelfth century BCE. 9 To be sure, Ugarit’s
mercantile civilization was ill-suited to withstand the onslaught of
the Sea Peoples, yet the disintegration of Ugarit’s palace-temple
economy had already begun well before the Sea Peoples’
migrations. The end of the Late Bronze Age was marked by a
general process of ruralization in the countryside that undermined
the support of the urban economy and ultimately exacerbated the
ultimate demise of Ugarit as well as other Late Bronze Age
kingdoms.
1.4 LIFE IN ANCIENT UGARIT
The culture of Ugarit was composite. It was all at the same time: a
Syrian port with Mediterranean trade, a west Semitic city-state
that was a vassal of the Hittite kingdom, and a Northwest Semitic
population in a cuneiform world. Whatever measure we
use—personal names, language, religion, or material culture—Ugarit
appears to be an eclectic admixture of Syrian, Canaanite, Egyptian,
Mediterranean, and Mesopotamian cultures. Ugarit seems to have
thrived by becoming a meeting place of Near Eastern peoples (see,
e.g., KTU 1.40 vi, 35–43).
The economy of Ugarit was naturally dominated by the sea.
Alongside import and export concerns, Ugarit also developed
industries that were shaped by its maritime location such as purple
9 On the Sea Peoples, see E. Oren, editor, The Sea Peoples and Their World: A
Reassessment (Philadelphia, 2000).