Script and Society

The Social Context of Writing Practices in Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Philip J. Boyes

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789255843
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Archeologia

By the 13th century BC, the Syrian city of Ugarit hosted an extremely diverse range of writing practices. As well as two main scripts – alphabetic and logographic cuneiform - the site has also produced inscriptions in a wide range of scripts and languages, including Hurrian, Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs and Cypro-Minoan. This variety in script and language is accompanied by writing practices that blend influences from Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Levantine traditions together with what seem to be distinctive local innovations. Script and Society: The Social Context of Writing Practices in Late Bronze Age Ugarit explores the social and cultural context of these complex writing traditions from the perspective of writing as a social practice. It combines archaeology, epigraphy, history and anthropology to present a highly interdisciplinary exploration of social questions relating to writing at the site, including matters of gender, ethnicity, status and other forms of identity, the relationship between writing and place, and the complex relationships between inscribed and uninscribed objects. This forms a case- study for a wider discussion of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of writing practices in the ancient world.

Part I

Background, theory and methods

Chapter 1

Introduction: Ugarit and its scripts

Writing is a social practice. It fits into the same category as cooking a meal, performing one’s daily routines, worshipping a deity. It is a thing that people do, and that they do according to patterns within which they have been socialised or which they have cultivated. It is not usually a solitary practice but one of communication and interaction, even if that occurs at some remove in time and space and even if the interlocutor in some cases is only imagined.

This, I would hope, is self-evident, since it forms the foundational premise for this book. It is also somewhat at odds with how writing in the ancient world can often be approached by scholars. Much work on writing has focused on writing systems, on the abstracted and self-contained workings of the scripts themselves, their development, spread and the techniques of their use. Research of this kind, while useful, can be strikingly unpeopled: it is filled with systems, graphemes, phonemes and styles. It is immaterial, austere and often mechanistic, and can seem divorced from the other practices of human life, from beliefs and agendas, from choices and agency. The goal of this work is to redress that balance, to reintegrate writing practices with other aspects of human practice and human social life, to situate them within their specific historical, cultural and material contexts – in this example using the case study of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of Ugarit, a small but prosperous trading city on the coast of what’s now Syria. It is, in short, to produce an archaeology of writing practices at Ugarit, fully integrated into the rest of the polity’s archaeology.

As such, this book isn’t a comprehensive guide to the languages and scripts of Ugarit. Such works already exist by scholars eminently more qualified than me to describe the linguistic and palaeographic details.1 Nevertheless, since I hope this volume will be of interest to archaeologists and non-specialists who may not be as well acquainted with the principles of the main scripts we’ll be discussing, this introductory chapter will lay them out in brief summary, after providing a grounding in the site of Ugarit and the history of research there.

Introducing Ugarit

A 5 heures de l’après-midi, lorsque le soleil couchant transformait les montagnes alaouites à l’est du tell en une frange dorée, j’observais l’un de mes ouvriers qui arrêta son travail pour examiner ce qui à distance avait l’aspect d’une petite brique. Mohamed Moursal, un Turcoman de Bordj Islam, bon ouvrier, mais préférant l’effort plutôt que le travail délicat de dégager des objets fragiles crachait sur sa trouvaille et avec la paume de sa main droite frottait dessus pour enlever la pellicule de terre qui masqua la surface.2

Thanks in part to colourful retellings such as that quoted above, written by Claude Schaeffer almost thirty years after the event, the tale of the discovery of the site of Ugarit and its archives of tablets has acquired something of the quality of legend, a true-life tale of chance discovery and buried treasure. In 1928, we are told, a local farmworker was ploughing fields near Minet el-Beida, around 12 km north of modern Latakia. His plough struck a stone and revealed the opening to a vaulted chamber tomb. His find swiftly attracted the attention of the interest of Service des Antiquités of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, under the direction of Charles Virolleaud.3 Excavations began the following year in 1929, led by Schaeffer, both at the necropolis at Minet el-Beida and the tell of Ras Shamra, around a kilometre inland. It was here that Mohamed Moursal made his important discovery, though of course it’s Schaeffer and Virolleaud’s names that would be remembered by history.

The importance of Ras Shamra was well established by the early campaigns, and its copious documents allowed it to be swiftly and securely identified as ancient Ugarit, whose magnificence was alluded to in the Amarna Letters:

[The king of Tyre’s] property is as great as the sea. I know it! Look, there is no mayor’s palace like that of the palace in Tyre. It is like the palace in Ugarit. Exceedingly great is the wealth in it.4

Excavations continued until the outbreak of the Second World War. This work focused particularly on the area of the acropolis, including the important archives of the House of the High Priest. Full-scale excavations resumed in 1950, in the area of the Royal Palace. Schaeffer remained director until 1970, when he was replaced by Henri de Contenson. After him, work at the site continued under Jean Margueron, Marguerite Yon, Yves Calvert and Bassam Jamous. In 2005 the archaeological investigations were formally shifted from a French operation to a joint Franco-Syrian undertaking. They are currently co-directed by Valérie Matoïan and Khozama Al-Bahloul. At the time of writing, the civil war in Syria has interrupted archaeological investigation at the site, but to date it appears that Ugarit has fortunately largely escaped the large-scale damage and looting that has devastated many of the country’s other historic sites.5

The site

The tell of Ugarit covers about 28 ha and rises around 17–20 m above the surrounding terrain at its highest point, the acropolis where the city’s principal temples stood. The elevation of the site is, however, extremely uneven, with a marked depression towards the south. Deep sondages at the site have indicated that it was likely occupied since the Neolithic, in the eighth millennium BC, but for the most part archaeological work has proceeded outwards rather than down, uncovering an extensive area of the Late Bronze Age city but providing us with relatively little diachronic information. There have been some features excavated that have been dated earlier, such as various tombs, the so-called Hurrian Temple or the North Palace, all of which have at various times been assigned to the Middle Bronze Age; however, these are either poorly published, as with the funerary evidence, or have been shown by more recent work to belong to the Late Bronze Age, as is the case with the ‘North Palace’. Sondages and Middle Bronze Age finds point to the important temples of Baʿlu and Dagan having existed at this period, but the surviving remains are fragmentary and provide little to go on.6 It does appear that there were a number of major construction horizons within the Late Bronze Age; the Royal Palace, for instance, evidences several destructions and rebuildings, including one that excavators have been keen to link with the partial destruction by fire alluded to in Amarna Letter EA 151 (hence, mid-fourteenth century), and a second around a century later that is paralleled across much of the rest of the site and is generally seen as due to an earthquake. The latter phase of rebuilding and restructuring is particularly important for our purposes as it coincides with the adoption of the alphabetic cuneiform script.

Excavators at Ugarit have delineated an assortment of broad districts. It’s not necessary to explore each of these in detail here,7 but a general sketch gives a helpful overview of the character of the site. The two main focuses of elite activity are the Royal Palace and the Acropolis. The former is a massive complex in the north-west of the city, covering around 10,000 square metres of palace and associated structures. In keeping with its political status, it appears to have been somewhat segregated from the rest of the site, with relatively few, closely controlled, connections between them and its own monumental fortified gatehouse in the western rampart of the tell. The Acropolis, in the north-eastern corner of the site, is most famous for being the home of Ugarit’s two most prominent temples, to Baʿlu and Dagan, and for the so-called residence of the High Priest between them, from which have been recovered a number of literary and religious texts, including the celebrated Baʿlu epic.

Ugarit was not, however, characterised by a high level of urban planning – it was densely occupied, with labyrinthine and narrow streets (sometimes as little as around 1 m wide). Beyond the royal district, there was not rigid zoning by function or status. Certainly, there seem to be more high-status residences close to the palace, but these jostle with smaller houses; there’s general residential occupation on the Acropolis right up to the temples. Large residences belonging to senior officials pop up amid the smaller homes of ordinary Ugaritians. Shops, workshops and smaller temples are interspersed in and among the warren of domestic habitation. Buildings of different function and status are jumbled together in a chaotic hodgepodge of human life. It can be helpful for modern scholars to talk about the ‘South Acropolis’ or the ‘City Centre’, but these should not be taken to imply the existence of well-defined correlating districts in the ancient city. This appearance of disorganisation extends to the deposits of written material. Collections of inscribed materials have been found throughout the city, and these include a wide range of scripts, languages and genres in various relationships with the ruling authorities. The so-called House of ʾUrtenu, for example, is in the South-central area, some distance from the Palace and not far from the main north–south thoroughfare that ran through the heart of the general residential area. Nevertheless, ʾUrtenu seems to have been an extremely high-ranking official and his archive includes a wide array of diplomatic and other official texts, including royal correspondence.

As is well known, Ugarit was destroyed at the end of the Late Bronze Age, an act usually attributed to the so-called Sea Peoples. There are limited signs of subsequent occupation, including small-scale use of the site by non-sedentary populations during the Iron Age, and a certain amount of inhabitation in the Persian and Roman eras, but unlike many similar Levantine sites Ugarit was not rebuilt or reoccupied on a large scale (see Chapter 12).

The Kingdom of Ugarit

The territory of Ugarit is relatively well-defined thanks to the surviving textual material (see Fig. 0.2 at the start of this volume).8 In the north it was bounded by the mountains that stretched inland from Mt Ṣapanu (modern Jebel al-Aqra), where Baʿlu was believed to have his palace. The western boundary was, of course, the sea. In the east, the Jebel al-Ansariyeh mountains provide an obvious natural boundary for most of Ugarit’s territory, although the question of the Nahr al-Kabir valley has been debated. This route into the Orontes valley was the only connection between Ugarit and the Syrian interior, and scholars have taken differing stances on the extent of Ugarit’s control along it. The maximalist position was proposed by Michael Astour, who attempted to identify locations well east of the Orontes with the toponyms l...