Ugarit

Located at modern-day Ras Shamra (8km north of Latakia, Syria), Ugarit was the capital of a trading emporium at the Levant during the Late Bronze Age until its destruction ca. 1175 BC. The relationship between the kingdom of Ugarit and its overlord Ḫatti is richly documented in the Ras Shamra texts, one of the most extensive archives from ancient Syria.

Excavations were conducted by French missions from 1929, directed by Claude Schaeffer until 1978, when Marguerite Yon succeeded him in charge. In sum, the site was excavated for almost 80 years, save for an interruption from 1939 to 1948.

The archives of Ugarit cover only the era of Hittite dominion, from the second half of the 14th century to the opening decades of the 12th century BCE, up until the very destruction of the city. Excavations provided researchers with an astonishing amount of textual data allowing the reconstruction of the geo-political and economic history of Ugarit. Administrative and legal texts, as well as royal correspondence, were predominantly found in the Palace archives, but also private archives have provided a remarkable number of important documents, especially royal letters. Only the House of Urtenu, the largest private archive found in Ugarit, yielded 650 tablets.

Textual evidence has been gradually published in the archaeological series Ugaritica (1939–1978) and Ras Shamra-Ougarit (RSO, from 1983). The most recent publication is the epistolary archive of the House of Urtenu (Lackenbacher & Malbran-Labat 2016 = RSO 23), with letters from the Hittite king, the viceroy at Carchemish, and rulers of kingdoms such as Tarḫuntašša or Kizzuwatna, which were submitted to Hatti.