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

Ancient Ugarit 23
epistolary genre is a more methodologically sound place to describe
Ugaritic grammar than epic poetry. Despite the advantages of the
epistolary genre as a starting point for Ugaritic study, students
must still grapple with challenges in these texts. For example, our
lack of knowledge about the precise circumstances surrounding the
composition of the letters forces us to imagine the occasion of the
letter. Sometimes there are gaps in information due to physical
breaks in the letter. Sometimes there are conceptual breaks in the
letter, generally related to the lack of knowledge of a context and/or
to the presence of one or more ambiguous words. These small
issues will serve as an initiation into the more difficult problems in
reading Ugaritic poetry.
1.6.3 Administrative and Economic Texts (Chapter 4)
The largest corpus of Ugaritic texts is the administrative and
economic texts (UDB, pp. 767–1775). Although many of the texts
are short and mundane, taken together they point to a central
purpose of writing in ancient Ugarit, namely, the maintenance of a
complex economy. Writing was used primarily to store data about
economic and administrative activites.
1.6.4 Legal Texts (Chapter 5)
Legal texts written in alphabetic cuneiform are uncommon among
the discoveries of Ugarit. The scribes wrote the majority of legal
texts from Ras Shamra in syllabic cuneiform. Akkadian, the lingua
franca of the day, was the language of legalese in Ugarit, especially
for the writing of diplomatic texts. Scribes chose to write only local
administrative texts in the local language. These are grouped
together in KTU 3.
Three legal texts in alphabetic cuneiform introduce students to
the genre. The final legal text, KTU 3.9, details the organization of
an ancient institution called a marzih˙u. This text forms a transition
to the first of the poetic texts, KTU 1.114 (exercise §6.1), which
describes El’s marzih˙u. The three documents are
KTU 3.3 Document of Guarantee