Act 4: The End Of An Era: The Twelfth Century Bc

The 12th century BC is marked more by tales of woe and destruction than by trade and international relations.

THE DISCOVERY OF UGARIT AND MINET EL-BEIDA

In 1929, French archaeologists excavated a tomb and port city at Minet el-Beida Bay, now referred to as Minet el-Beida.

800 meters farther inland, within a modern mound called Ras Shamra, the capital city of Ugarit was discovered afterward.

It was a busy, and prosperous commercial city and port, which were suddenly destroyed and abandoned soon after the beginning of the 12th century BC.

Within the ruins, products from all over the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean have been found.

A warehouse in Minet el-Beida, for example, still held 80 Canaanite storage jars. Unfortunately, these were found in the 1930s, so rigorous scientific analyses of the contents were not conducted.

Within the private houses and the royal palace at Ugarit, a number of important archives have been recovered since the 1950s, documenting the economic activities of several merchants, as well as of Ugarit’s royal family.

The letters and other items in these archives were written on clay tablets, as was usual in the Bronze Age, but in this case tablets were found inscribed with different languages: sometimes Akkadian, sometimes Hittite, sometimes Egyptian, and sometimes other less widely used languages, such as Hurrian.

There was one other language that scholars had never previously seen. It was deciphered fairly rapidly and is now called Ugaritic.

It used one of the earliest alphabetic scripts yet known—except that there were actually two alphabetic scripts in the texts, one with twenty-two signs like the Phoenician alphabet and the other with an additional eight signs.4

These Ugaritic texts, of which there is now such a large corpus that they have spawned a cottage industry of modern scholarship known as Ugaritic studies, include not only the archives and correspondence of the merchants and the king, but also examples of literature, mythology, history, religion, and other elements belonging to a thriving civilization aware of its own legacy.

The result is that we can reconstruct the city of Ugarit from its ruins and can reconstitute as well, from its texts, the daily life and belief systems of its inhabitants. For example, it is clear that they worshipped a pantheon of deities, among whom El and Baal figured prominently.

We know the names of their kings, from Ammistamru I and Niqmaddu II, whose letters to Amenhotep III and Akhenaten are in the Amarna archive in Egypt, to the very last king, Ammurapi, who ruled in the first decade of the twelfth century BC.

The kings of Ugarit married princesses from the neighboring polity of Amurru, and probably also from the larger kingdom of the Hittites, in dynastic marriages complete with dowries that were quite literally fit for a king, though at least one of these marriages ended in a bitter divorce that dragged on in the courts for years.5