Thirty Seasons at Ugarit (A Review)

Extract

Ras Shamra (Ugarit) has been one of the outstanding archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. Its distinguished excavator, Cl. F. A. Schaerffer, in 1968 completed his thirtieth season at the site, and to mark the occasion his friends and colleagues were invited to contribute to a volume in his honour. The contributions proved so numerous that two volumes were necessary to contain them. One, which has not yet appeared, will be devoted to articles relating to Enkomi-Alashia. The remainder have been assembled in a new volume of the honorand's own series, Ugaritica. The circumstances are explained in a short foreword by A. Parrot.

As is usual in a Festschrift, the thirty-eight articles are of very varied content. Most, though not all, are directly related in some way to the discoveries at Ugarit. Those of H. de Contenson, J. C. and L. Courtois and A. Bounni, indeed, are actual reports on the excavation of a particular part of the site. H. de Contenson describes in detail the Early Bronze and Obeid levels grouped together as “Niveau III”, to the south of the acropolis. His contribution— much the longest in the volume—will be of special interest to prehistorians on account of the wide variety of objects from these levels which it illustrates. J. C. Courtois reports on the “House of the Priest” or “Priest's Library” excavated in 1961, where a number of Ugaritic and Hurrian tablets came to light. L. Courtois describes the pottery found in a Late Bronze Age tomb; while A. Bounni gives an account of the discovery of parts of a Roman water installation which came to light in 1959 at the south-west corner of the mound during the construction of a modern road.