Back to Ugarit
Archaeologists return to northwestern Syria
Stela of Baal with lightning, from acropolis Ugarit. Courtesy Photo Companion to the Bible, Genesis.
After nearly a decade and a half, archaeologists have returned to northwestern Syria, digging in the shadow of the important Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE) city of Ugarit. With the conclusion to the lengthy Syrian civil war, which halted nearly all foreign excavations in Syria, a joint Italian-Turkish team has broken ground at Tell Semhane, an unexcavated mound just a few miles from ancient Ugarit that archaeologists believe had close connections with the larger regional center.
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Exploring an Ugaritic Settlement
Ugarit was an important Bronze Age city, renowned as a coastal mercantile kingdom with trade connections across the eastern Mediterranean, including with Egypt, Cyprus, the Aegean, the Hittites, Syria, and Canaan. Since Ugarit had particularly close cultural ties to the southern Levant, archaeologists, historians, and biblical scholars have frequently turned to the site for clues about Canaanite culture, thanks especially to the thousands of cuneiform tablets that were discovered there. These tablets were written in various languages, including Ugaritic, an ancient language closely related to Canaanite and biblical Hebrew. The tablets served as a treasure trove of historical information and provided a fascinating look into broader Levantine cultural and religious traditions.
The Tell Semhane excavations aim to add even more to our understanding of ancient Levantine life by examining a previously unexplored settlement within the Ugaritic sphere. “Our goal is to uncover a Bronze Age settlement in its entirety,” Adahan Güney, one of the Turkish Ph.D. students working at the site, told Arkeonews. “In Near Eastern archaeology, most projects focus on temples or palaces. Here, we have the rare opportunity to study a complete settlement context, which could transform our understanding of everyday life in the Bronze Age.”
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The Israelite religion, and eventually Judaism, have their roots in Ugarit. Even the story of Solomon’s Temple was originally a Canaanite story, with the oldest known versions of the story uncovered on tablets at Ugarit. The better we understand the Canaanites, the better we will understand the Old Testament.