Ugarit

Listen to the ground under your feet. It crunches softly, with dry soil, broken pottery and small chips of pale limestone. A breeze comes in from the Mediterranean, carrying salt and the smell of wild fennel. Around you, low stone walls run in every direction. At first they look like a maze without a plan. Stay with them for a moment. You are walking through the streets of a Bronze Age city that was lost for more than three thousand years.

This place is called Ras Shamra today, which means roughly 'Fennel Headland' in Arabic. It sits a short drive north of modern Latakia, close to the coast. The site is a tell. A tell is an artificial hill made by people, built up slowly as each generation rebuilt on top of the ruins of the last. Excavators have found traces of settlement here going back to the Neolithic, the late Stone Age, many thousands of years before the famous city you see today.

The rediscovery began by accident. In 1928, a local farmer was ploughing near the bay of Minet el-Beida, just below this hill. His plough struck a stone slab. Beneath it was an ancient tomb. News reached the French authorities who governed the region at that time. In 1929, an archaeologist named Claude Schaeffer began digging. Within weeks, his team found clay tablets covered in a script nobody could read. That was the moment Ugarit came back into history.

So what was Ugarit? In the Late Bronze Age, roughly the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries before the common era, it was the capital of a small but wealthy kingdom. Its kings did not rule a great empire. Instead, they sat between empires. Egypt lay to the south. The Hittites, a powerful kingdom based in what is now Turkey, lay to the north. For much of its later history, Ugarit was a Hittite vassal, a junior partner that paid tribute and kept the trade routes open.

Trade was the heart of this city. Ships from Cyprus, Egypt and the Aegean world came into the harbour below. Caravans brought goods from inland Syria and Mesopotamia. Merchants dealt in copper, tin, timber, olive oil, wine and textiles. Archaeologists found Mycenaean pottery from Greece here, along with Egyptian objects and Cypriot wares. Imagine the harbour full of voices in many languages. Scribes in this city worked in several of them, and some tablets list words side by side, like an early dictionary.

That brings us to the first great surprise of Ugarit. The scribes here wrote with a wedge-shaped script on clay, like the cuneiform of Mesopotamia. But the local Ugaritic script was different. It used only about thirty signs, and each sign stood for a single sound. In other words, it was an alphabet. Most cuneiform systems needed hundreds of signs. One small tablet from this site lists the letters in order, like a child's ABC. It is one of the oldest known alphabetic sequences in the world.

Now walk toward the western side of the tell, where the walls grow larger and more regular. This is the area of the Royal Palace. It was a huge complex, with many rooms, courtyards, staircases and archives. Look at the stone. Some walls are built with carefully cut, squared blocks. Others mix rough stones with traces of wooden beams, which once helped the walls survive earthquakes. Here and there you can still see stone thresholds, worn smooth by feet that crossed them thousands of years ago.

Near the palace, look for the old postern gate. A postern is a small, secondary entrance through the city's defensive wall. This one is a narrow passage roofed with stones that step inward until they meet, a technique called corbelling. Walking through it is one of the quiet thrills of the site. The space feels close and cool. For a moment, you move exactly as a guard or a messenger moved through the fortification of this Bronze Age city.

Climb now toward the highest part of the tell, the acropolis. Two temples stood up here. Scholars connect one with Baal, the storm god, and the other with Dagan, a god of grain and fertility. Today you see mostly foundations. But the tablets from Ugarit preserve long poems about Baal, his battles with the sea and with death itself. These texts helped scholars understand the wider religious world of the ancient Levant, including ideas and imagery that also appear in the Hebrew Bible.

Here is the second surprise. Among the tablets found here was a hymn written in the Hurrian language, with signs that describe how it should be played. Many scholars consider it the oldest substantially complete piece of written music yet discovered. Musicians today still argue about how to interpret those notes, and you can find several modern reconstructions. It is a strange thought. Somewhere on this hill, more than three thousand years ago, someone sang a song that we can still try to hear.

As you walk the residential quarters, notice the houses packed tightly together along narrow lanes. Many homes had family tombs built beneath their floors. These tombs were stone chambers with roofs made in the same stepped, corbelled style as the postern gate. The dead stayed close to the living. Look down into one of these chambers if you find it open. The neat stonework shows how much care families put into the space below their daily lives.

Ugarit's end came suddenly, around the early twelfth century before the common era. This was the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, when many kingdoms around the eastern Mediterranean fell within a few decades. Letters from the last years of the city speak of enemy ships and of danger along the coast. Historians often link this period with raiders known as the Sea Peoples, though the full story was likely more complicated. The city burned, and it was never rebuilt as a capital.

Many of the finest objects from Ugarit no longer stand on this hill. Tablets, ivory carvings, gold bowls and statues now sit in museums, including in Damascus, Aleppo, Latakia and the Louvre in Paris. What remains here is the shape of the city itself. That is no small thing. You can still trace a street, turn a corner, step over a doorway and look into a room where a scribe once pressed a reed into wet clay.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and look west. The sea is still there, the same sea the merchant ships crossed. The fennel still grows between the stones. Listen again to the wind and to the soft crunch of the ground. As you walk back down the slope, look at the low walls once more. They are no longer a maze. They are streets and homes, and some of the oldest letters ever written came from them.