The tell was the site of the ancient port of Ugarit, important
enough to have been fortified in neolithic times (c.6000BC) but in its heyday in the Late Bronze age.
It was destroyed c.1190BC by the mysterious “Sea Peoples”.
The tomb was dated late 13th century and contained the only extant tablets in Ugaritic, these being the oldest exemplars of any language with an alphabetical script that we have. Moreover, Korpel & de Moor point out that “Ugaritic is a dialect of the family of languages commonly called Canaanite”, and Hebrew is also in this family. Therefore the decipherment and interpretation of these tablets is of very considerable interest; as they say, “the texts from Ugarit have helped scholars to better understand many words, expressions and ideas in the Bible”.Korpel & de Moor’s monograph is deeply interesting. They have reconstructed, translated and interpreted important Ugaritic texts from the late 13th century BC with impressive scholarship, and they have explained the links with and relevance to the Hebrew canonical text, a text that remains one of pivotal cultural significance, with equal conviction. This work is important!
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