Translation is seldom a straightforward exercise.1 One may be reminded of all those hypothetical but nonetheless disappointed British tourists who happily tried to visit a football match in the United States of America and left very confused. And such contemporary matters, like when the sport that the British call âfootballâ is known as âsoccerâ in certain other parts of the world, are complicated enough.2 Imagine if a chasm of more than three millennia separates us from the language we aim to understand! And it is bridging such a chasm that we are attempting in todayâs blog. As I shall show you the difficulty with understanding the lexicon of the ancient Levantine language that is today known as Ugaritic.
Category Archives: Ancient Levant
Byblos: At the Crossroads of the Ancient World
Say you were a time traveler with a time machine that was very expensive to operate â as most of them are, in my experience â and therefore your goal was to experience as much aspects of the ancient world as is possible in one go. Then Byblos would definitely be one of the places to be! Because this city in the eastern Mediterranean was a veritable metropolis of antiquity, where the gates and docks welcomed a varied and marvelous array of political, cultural, and artistic influences. Here you could observe hieroglyphs next to cuneiform writing, read the names of Pharaohs which adorned votive vessels, and find precious ingredients that would eventually end up in mummies.1
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The Cosmic Geography of Ugarit
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 oneâs time online.2 Because, in this way, you are nonetheless able to learn a lot â 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.