Who ruled Ugarit?

Ugarit was a Bronze Age port city on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, about 10 kilometres north of modern Latakia, at the mound now called Ras Shamra. At its height between roughly 1450 and 1185 BC it was the capital of a prosperous merchant kingdom that dealt with Egypt, Cyprus, the Aegean and the Hittites. It was destroyed in the upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age and forgotten until 1928. Its clay tablets preserve the oldest known alphabet used in a systematic way and a rich body of literature in its own Semitic language.

The mound was first settled in the Neolithic, perhaps as early as the end of the eighth millennium BC, and occupation continued through the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Ugarit appears in written sources in the eighteenth century BC: the archives of Mari mention it, and King Zimri-Lim of Mari paid it a state visit. At that time it was one of several small kingdoms owing allegiance to Yamhad, the great power centred on Aleppo. Objects bearing the names of Middle Kingdom pharaohs show early contact with Egypt. When Hittite armies broke the power of Yamhad around 1600 BC, Ugarit, shielded by mountains on its landward side, appears to have escaped the worst of the devastation that fell on inland Syria.

The city's golden age came in the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 to 1200 BC. Its rulers controlled a territory of roughly 2,000 square kilometres, close to the modern Latakia governorate, and the city itself may have held some 7,000 to 8,000 people. A royal palace grew in several phases to cover about 6,500 square metres, with rooms around courtyards and archives of tablets; a letter from the king of Byblos compared another king's palace to Ugarit's as a measure of splendour.

In the mid-fourteenth century King Ammittamru I exchanged friendly letters with the pharaoh of the New Kingdom of Egypt, and several of the Amarna letters were written at Ugarit. Under his son Niqmaddu II the city became a vassal of the Hittites, answering to the Hittite viceroy at Carchemish, while keeping its diplomatic and trading ties with Egypt and with Alashiya, probably Cyprus. Pottery from Mycenaean Greece and Cyprus found in the ruins confirms how far its trade reached.

Scribes at Ugarit worked mainly in Akkadian, the diplomatic language of the age, but they also wrote the local Ugaritic language in a cuneiform alphabet of 30 signs, developed around 1400 BC. Its letter order closely resembles that of the later Phoenician alphabet. Several thousand tablets survive, including letters, legal and administrative records, and poems such as the Baal cycle and the legends of Keret and Danel.

In the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BC the eastern Mediterranean suffered severe food shortages, and Ugarit, itself a major grain shipper, was soon pleading with Egypt for grain. The last king, Ammurapi, who reigned at the same time as Suppiluliuma II, the last known Hittite king, sent his army to support the Hittites and his fleet to the coast of Lukka in Anatolia. In a letter to the king of Alashiya he reported that enemy ships had burned his towns, writing that "the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us". He appealed to Carchemish for help, but the city had been sacked before the Hittite relief force arrived, around 1185 BC. Its fall was one episode in the wider Late Bronze Age collapse, which destroyed neighbouring coastal towns at the same time. Afterwards its very location was forgotten.

In 1928 a farmer ploughing near the bay of Minet el-Beida broke into an ancient tomb, part of Ugarit's necropolis by its harbour. The area was then part of the French-ruled Alawite State. From 1929 a French mission led by Claude Schaeffer excavated the main mound, uncovering the palace, the temples of Baal and Dagon on the acropolis and residential quarters. Work stopped during the Second World War, resumed in 1950, and from 2005 was carried out jointly by French and Syrian teams. The tell covers about 28 hectares, part of it under orange groves, and excavation was halted by the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.