Ugaritic Letters and Ritual Texts: Dennis Pardee

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Ugaritic Letters and Ritual Texts

Dennis Pardee
new entry in the Annual Report deserves some explaining. Ugarit

A was the ancient name of a city located on the coast of what is
today Syria, just a few miles north of Latakia. The modern tell goes by
the name of Ras esh-Shamra, "Cape Fennel," named after the plant that
grows there in profusion during the months of summer and fall.
French excavations began there in 1929 and have continued to this
day. During the very first season tablets were discovered which bore
not only the well-known Akkadian script and language but others as
well with a totally new script. Because, as it turned out, the language
of these other tablets was Semitic, fairly closely related to Phoenician
and to Hebrew, the script was deciphered within a year and the
language was identified as the local language of ca. 1400-1200 B.C., the
only West Semitic language known to this day to have been written by
means of the cuneiform system.
Further excavations and discoveries at Ugarit and elsewhere have
shown that the period of the Ugaritic tablets was both the heyday and
the last gasp of the Ugaritic city-state, for its civilization, reaching back
at least in its material remains to the fifth millennium B.C., was
destroyed by the Sea Peoples and the mound henceforth was inhabited
only occasionally and by much smaller groups.
My own interest in Ugaritic began before coming to Chicago and
was fostered by my professor here, Stanley Gevirtz. A Fulbright-Hayes
Senior Lectureship at Aleppo University in 1980-1981 permitted a
prolonged period of contact with the Ugaritic tablets themselves, most
of which are kept now in the museums of Aleppo and Damascus, with
a few still in Paris. The current Mission de Ras Shamra as well as the
Syrian Department of Antiquities and Museums gave me every facility
for access to and study of the tablets.
Having then just completed a study of Hebrew letters from the
biblical period, I was especially interested in the Ugaritic epistolary
texts and began my study with them. For my own training, I went
about studying the tablets as though they were totally new documents,
doing detailed hand-copies and taking photographs of each one,
though virtually all had previously been published. This turned out to
have been a good plan, for as I studied I discovered that the previous
editions of many of the tablets had been based, not on examination of
46 PHILOLOGY
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the tablets themselves, but on study of secondary materials, in this case

casts and photographs of the tablets. Thus many new readings were
emerging. Several weeks into my study I also discovered the benefits
to be gained from the use of a low-powered binocular microscope.
With magnification of 10x-20x, one can often distinguish what the
naked eye (at least mine) could not see in the attempt to distinguish an
accidental crack from a true sign. In January of 1981 I ran out of
epistolary texts and went to work on a totally new category, that of
ritual texts. These are rather arid descriptions of sacrifices to various
deities that are very difficult to interpret, and had been widely ignored
in Ugaritic scholarship.
Once back in Chicago, I began casting about for ways of speeding

up the publication of my new readings and decided to apply to the
National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant under their
Translations Program. As of April, 1983, a grant was awarded which
permits me to hire a research assistant for two years and to have
photographs printed of the tablets I studied. In Donna Freilich, who
had just passed her Ph.D. qualifying examinations and wished to do
her dissertation on the Ugaritic ritual texts, I found an ideally qualified
research assistant. Donna, meanwhile, has the opportunity to work up
annotated translations of the texts upon which her dissertation will
eventually be based. As of this writing, half of the photographs have
been printed and we are deep into the epigraphic and philological
analysis of the texts themselves.
UGARITIC LETTERS 47

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oi.uchicago.

Ugaritic Letters and Ritual Texts

new entry in the Annual Report deserves some explaining. Ugarit

the tablets themselves, but on study of secondary materials, in this case

Once back in Chicago, I began casting about for ways of speeding

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