Many of us have found ourselves, at one point in our lives or another, in a so-called Wikipedia rabbit hole.¹ Wherein you try to learn about a certain topic with the help of the popular digital encyclopedia, but end up going from topic to topic through clicking cross references while much more time than anticipated passes by! And despite the regularly suggested shortcomings of Wikipedia, such a pastime is perhaps more useful than many of the other ways in which one can spend one’s time online.² Because, in this way, you are nonetheless able to learn a lot – a subject that you had previously never heard of might even become a veritable obsession. And one of the subjects that could be a candidate for such an obsession when people would coincidentally stumble upon it is, I think, the ancient city and kingdom of Ugarit and especially the way in which the people who lived there used to imagine the local landscapes.

In this week’s blog I will therefore introduce you to ancient Ugarit, the modern site of Tel Shamra in Syria, and the way in which its inhabitants connected the surrounding landscapes with the supernatural.³ This blog is for an important part inspired by Jordi Verdal’s older but still excellent article The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit.⁴ And if or when your interest is piqued by this blog, that article would be a good starting point for further reading on all the deities and monsters that were thought to be present in the environs of Ugarit.

This blog is also available in Dutch.

Ancient Ugarit

The kingdom of Ugarit was situated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, opposite the island of Cyprus and roughly coinciding with the modern administrative area Ladhakia.⁵ Its inhabitants have been estimated at 25.000 souls, while another 10.000 might have in lived the eponymous capital city.⁶ Going by the archeological remains and textual documentation, the site of the city of Ugarit had been occupied from somewhere in the early Neolithic, or eight millennium BCE, and the settlement existed until somewhere between 1190-1185 BCE. Though the city is best known from the centuries immediately preceding its demise.⁷ This era, known as the late Bronze Age, was a time of shifting political fortunes and alliances across the Levant.⁸ Ugarit thrived especially in the fourteenth century BCE, due to close connections with the Anatolia-based Hittite Empire and the decline of the Mitanni Empire to its east.⁹ And when the often volatile relationship between the Hittite and Egyptian kingdoms would allow for it, Ugarit was also on good terms with ancient Egypt, especially in the last century of its existence.¹⁰ How did that existence end, you might ask? Well, in the twelfth century BCE there was great upheaval in the ancient world, from ancient Greece, along the Mediterranean coast, and all the way to Egypt – an event colloquially known as the Bronze Age Collapse.¹¹ The causes and extent of this upheaval are still debated.¹² But with regard to Ugarit, we are fairly certain that it was accompanied by plundering invaders. This is on account of the obviously destroyed remains of the city and the frantic correspondence of the contemporary king in his hour of need.¹³ The story of Ugarit thus came to a heart-wrenching end.¹⁴

But it is exactly that end, in a morbidly ironic twist, which helped us to rediscover that story in the modern age. As the sudden destruction of Ugarit left a wealth of evidence for archeologists. The capital city was rediscovered in 1928 CE by a local farmer named Mahmoud Mella az-Zîr, and proper excavations started a year later.¹⁵ Especially the amount of written evidence found across the ancient kingdom, though modest compared to some other ancient polities, has been a great resource with which to reconstruct the lives and ideas of the people living there in the Bronze Age.¹⁶ And this includes the way the local geography was connected by its inhabitants to the supernatural.

Multilingualism and Digraphia

An introduction to the sources at our disposal comes down, as it almost always does when venturing into antiquity, to languages and writing systems – and not only because I like to talk about these subjects! Because our sources encompass an array of languages and writing systems. The most prominent of these languages were Akkadian, Hurrian, and the native Ugaritic.¹⁷ During the Late Bronze Age, Akkadian was the lingua franca of the ancient Near East. This language from Mesopotamia – roughly present-day Iraq and parts of Syria – was used as the means of communication between many of the polities at the time. Clay tablets with the language, written in the customary cuneiform script, have been found from Egypt to Anatolia – and also in Ugarit.¹⁸ But the cuneiform writing system, though I love it to death, is rather cumbersome. Even in its earliest iterations it was already comprised of hundreds of signs, with almost all of them having a variety of meanings.¹⁹ So a person or persons in Ugarit took it upon themselves to drastically simplify their way of writing. And their efforts resulted in the famed Ugaritic alphabet. In this writing system, a number of cuneiform signs was created to represent consonants, as well as a few vowels which were each attached to a glottal stop.²⁰ After a period of experimentation with even fewer signs, an alphabet with 30 letters emerged.²¹ This script was used for other tongues, like the aforementioned Hurrian and Akkadian, but also for the Ugaritic language itself. And primarily in this writing and mostly the latter language, in addition to proper cuneiform texts, we find a small but fairly unique corpus of texts on the local religious beliefs and practices, such as myths, songs, and prayers.²²

For scholars who want to know more about the religious beliefs and practices of the people living in Ugarit – or at least those that were committed to writing and have come down to us – there are roughly two types of relevant written sources: narrative texts and ritual texts.²³ And the information from these written sources can often be supplemented through archeology. In addition, we can glean a lot of information from toponyms – or the names for places.²⁴ And through studying these sources we get an interesting if incomplete view of the ways in which the inhabitants of the ancient city and kingdom of Ugarit imagined their contact with the supernatural and the relationship between the supernatural and the surrounding landscape.

An Enchanted Landscape

The religious beliefs and practices of the people of the city and kingdom of Ugarit did naturally not only pertain to their environs. We have also found urban temples and household shrines, for example.²⁵ But these people did trans-figure, so to say, elements of the landscapes they encountered. These elements “thus acquir[ed] a meaning beyond their primary or natural one.”²⁶ We can distinguish four main elements of the landscape that were connected to the supernatural: forests, mountains, water, and deserts.²⁷ Let us now consider these in turn

As we already saw with our previous foray into the perception of nature in the Gilgamesh Epic, forests may prove to be an ambiguous space. These are dangerous places to venture, but they also encompass stunning beauty, an abundance of resources, and the possibility to experience the undiluted divine – and this likewise seems to have been the attitude of the people of Ugarit. More specifically we see that the trees that make up forests were sacralized. They were symbols of fertility and protection, both in their connection to certain deities and on their own. As such, it should come as no surprise that there are material indications of tree cults.²⁸

Mountains were a prominent feature of the landscape of the kingdom of Ugarit.²⁹ And these were viewed, according to our sources, as both the abode of the gods and the place were heaven and earth touch.³⁰ In ancient Ugarit, the pop star Belinda Carlisle would therefore have been right – heaven is a place on earth.³¹ Another supernatural aspect of the mountains was their connection to the entrance to the netherworld.³² Thus, one would at least end one’s earthly existence with a momentous view – however foreboding.

Both the danger and the importance of water may be immediate to any reader – except those who live in a science-fiction future, wherein we don’t need water or air to survive. And especially in Ugarit, water proved to be a potent symbol of “purification and regeneration.”³³ Because without rain, there was no farming possible in this ancient kingdom. As such, the important position of weather gods in the local pantheon is understandable.³⁴ And this pantheon also shows us the dangerous side of water. Through the god Yam, for example, who represented the destructive potential of large bodies of water, like rivers and the sea.³⁵

The ambiguity presented with the local conception of the supernatural aspects of forests, mountains, and bodies of water as having both positive and negative qualities, is perhaps the least visible with our fourth major element of the Ugaritic landscape: the deserts. As such, we might – at first glance – only be able to see the frightening aspects. The desert as a place of death and destruction, populated by dangerous beasts and persons of ill repute.³⁶ But, as was the case in the wider Near East at the time, it would not surprise me if the ambiguity that characterizes the other landscapes in the minds of the people of Ugarit, also pertains to the deserts.³⁷ And a hint could perhaps be found if we take a closer look at the places within the deserts that have a designation which attests to the specific protection of certain deities.³⁸ Which brings us neatly to the information we can glean from such place names or toponyms.

The Power of Place Names

Hitherto we primarily talked about the evidence for the connection between the Ugaritic landscape and the supernatural, as it can be gleaned to our archeological and textual sources. But there is one other, rather unassuming source of knowledge that might be of assistance here: toponyms. Indeed, place names may be a prime source when one aims to establish the importance of the ideas about the supernatural that were projected on landscapes in the past.³⁹

Returning to the forests, mountains, waters, and desserts that so deeply impacted the beliefs and practices of the people of Ugarit, this point proves to be very salient.⁴⁰ In the absence of proper research into the place names that the people of Ugarit used for destinations in the desert – at least, as far as I could find – this is especially true with regard to the first three elements. We can, for instance, discern the reverence for forests in place names that reference forests or specific trees. Like zl dprn – ‘Shadow of the Juniper’.⁴¹ The same can be said for bodies of water, such as rivers and springs. They were deemed so important, that they can be found in place names all over the Ugaritic countryside. In one incantation the abode of the important god El is even noted as having such a name, mbk nhrm or ‘two-rivers’.⁴² If we turn to the names of mountains, such as mount Saphon, we may observe that these can also belong to deities – like when a mountain is deified. Or they might become part of the moniker of (other) deities. Such is the case with one of the sobriquets of the god Ba’al, that being ‘the lord of Saphon’ (b’l ṣpn).⁴³ Through combining what we have learned from our archeological and textual evidence, as well as these toponyms, there arises an enchanting landscape – a truly cosmic environment.

Conclusion: Everyday Enchantments

Would it be wise to venture into the forests, mountains, waters, and deserts of the ancient kingdom of Ugarit without heeding the enchantment of the landscape? Perhaps with our twenty-first century CE technologies, like GPS and helicopters, but even then we might not escape the awe that brought on the views and experiences which made the persons back then think of mighty gods and deified natural elements. And as the shadows lengthen, we may even wonder whether that mountain in the distance presents an entrance to the netherworld or if that tree over there is growing increasingly impatient while it awaits the reverence it is due.

One lesson we can take away from such views of nature as we found in ancient Ugarit, is perhaps to look for cosmic beauty in the landscapes that we travers during our daily life. To break free from our routines and our electronics, and admire the view from the train or bike – even if we have seen it a thousand times. Because, when we start looking, there is something enchanting in every landscape. Though probably with less deities and monsters than in antiquity.

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References

1. Emily Yahr, “’The Crown’ Sends Viewers Down Wikipedia Rabbit Hole: TV Shows Push Traffic to Site, Numbers Show”, Spokane Spokesman-Review January 5^th 2018, D, p. 13.
2. Joseph Michael Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), p. 169-173.
3. Roger Matthews, “Peoples and Complex Societies in Ancient Southwest Asia”, in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 457.
4. Jordi Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2004, 4 (1), p. 143-153.
5. Robert Hawley, “Ugaritic”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 257; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), p. 38.
6. Mario Liverani, The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy, Translated by Soraia Tabatabai (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), p. 326.
7. Hawley, “Ugaritic”, p. 257; Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 178; Matthews, “Peoples and Complex Societies in Ancient Southwest Asia”, p. 458.
8. Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 145.
9. Matthews, “Peoples and Complex Societies in Ancient Southwest Asia”, p. 457.
10. Wilfred H. van Soldt, “Ugarit: A Second-Millennium Kingdom”, in: Jack M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), p. 1264-1265.
11. Guy D. Middleton, “Getting Closer to the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean c. 1200 BC”, Anqiquity 2024, 98 (397), p. 260.
12. See for example: Brandon L. Drake, “The Influence of Climatic Change on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Greek Dark Ages, Journal of Archaeological Science 2012, 39 (6), p. 1862-1870; Jan Driessen (ed.), An Archaeology of Forced Migration: Crisis-Induced Mobility and the Collapse of the 13th c. BCE Eastern Mediterranean (Louvain-La-Neuve: Presses Universitaires, 2018); Mark Weeden, “The Hittite Empire”, in: Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller & Daniel T. Potts (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 600-601.
13. Van Soldt, “Ugarit: A Second-Millennium Kingdom”, p. 1265. For the scholarly debate pertaining to this correspondence, see: Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Revised and Updated Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 107-109.
14. Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, p. 178.
15. Pierre Bordreuil & Dennis Pardee, A Manual of Ugaritic (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), p. 1-2.
16. Hawley, “Ugaritic”, p. 258; John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishing, 2012), p. 3.
17. Hawley, “Ugaritic”, p. 258. On the languages that were actually spoken in Ugarit in addition to being written, see: Silvia Ferrara, “A ‘Top-Down’ Re-invention of an Old Form: Cuneiform Alphabets in Context”, in: Philip J. Boyes & Philippa M. Steele (eds.), Understanding Relations Between Scripts – Vol II: Early Alphabets (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020), p. 18.
18. Juan Pablo Viat, “Akkadian as a Lingua Franca”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 358-366.
19. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, Third Edition (Bethesda: CDL Press, 2005), p. 5.
20. Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic, p. 19-22. Whether these alphabetic cuneiform signs were indeed created out of whole cloth, adopted from Mesopotamian cuneiform signs, or inspired by another (proto-)alphabet is debated. For my part, I concur with Silvia Ferrara that the local knowledge of both other (proto-)alphabets and cuneiform was remolded into the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, see: Ferrara, “A ‘Top-Down’ Re-invention of an Old Form: Cuneiform Alphabets in Context”, p. 26-27.
21. Hawley, “Ugaritic”, p. 258.
22. Ibidem.
23. David P. Wright, “Syria and Canaan”, in: Sarah Iles Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 174.
24. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 143.
25. Gregorio del Olmo Lete, “Sacred Times and Spaces: Syria and Canaan”, in: Sarah Iles Johnston, Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 256.
26. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 151.
27. Ibidem, p. 151.
28. Ibidem, p. 144-145.
29. Van Soldt, “Ugarit: A Second-Millennium Kingdom”, p. 1255.
30. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 145-146.
31. Alex Henderson, “Heaven on Earth Review”, Allmusic (retrieved 23 April 2024).
32. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 146-148.
33. Ibidem, p. 149.
34. Ibidem; Wright, “Syria and Canaan”, p. 174.
35. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 149-150.
36. Ibidem, p. 150.
37. Laura Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mountain Wilderness in Old Babylonian Religious Narratives”, NUMEN 2016, 63 (4), p. 375; Laura Feldt, “Wilderness and Hebrew Bible Religion: Fertility, Apostasy and Religious Transformation in the Pentateuch”, in: Laura Feldt (ed.), Wilderness in Mythology and Religion: Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies and Ideas of Wild Nature (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), p. 56, note 6.
38. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 150-151.
39. Katherine Clarke, “Walking through History: Unlocking the Mythical Past”, in: Greta Hawes (ed.), Myths on the Map: The Storied Landscapes of Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 26.
40. See in general: Wilfred G.E. Watson, “The Lexical Aspect of Ugaritic Toponyms”, Aula Orientalis 2001, 19 (1-2), p. 109-123.
41. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 145; Mark S. Smith & Wayne T. Pitard, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle – Vol II: Introduction with Text, Translation and Commentary of KTU/CAT 1.3-1.4 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 650.
42. Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, p. 149.
43. Ibidem, p. 146.