Richard Stanley
Administrator
In 1928 a Syrian peasant plowed into a Mycenaean Greek tomb, and thus the ancient city known from such as the Amarna Letters was discovered. In 1929, clay tablets were discovered there revealing a previously unknown script. As such, the following is copied from Professor Cyrus H. Gordon's 1965 book, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilization, Chapter 5, titled "Ugarit: Link between Canaan and the Aegean". In this long excerpt Gordon will introduce some bi-directional parallels, that were: "notable overlaps that could not be accidental."
It should be noted that Gordon is writing long before the later archaeologists, such as Finkelstein have shown that the Hebrews and Israelites of the OT were indeed Canaanites. That had later been converted through various means, and that there is no evidence for the enslaved sojourn in Egypt and subsequent Exodus, - as recorded at least. Therefore, the import of the last paragraph above is that the redactors of the Hebrew 'Bible' were able to make use of pre-existing texts, themes and motifs that were already long existing and polished - just as was the case for the Greeks.
Part 1, from pp. 128-131:
Ugarit is of unique importance for reconstructing the origins of Western Civilisation. The reason is reflected in the nature of the discovery that called attention to the site in 1928. A Mycenaean tomb in the vicinity of a Semitic port meant that the area was one in which the people of Canaan and the Aegean had commingled. The archaeological finds at Ugarit brought this out quite clearly, and comparative archaeologists soon used those finds for studies of Mycenaean civilisation embracing Crete, the Peleponnesus and other parts of the Greek sphere. The late Miss H. L. Lorimer, in her notable book, Homer and the Monuments (London, 1950), went further: she drew heavily on the archaeological finds at Ugarit for illuminating problems arising from the text of Homer. However, she did not make a single reference to any of the Ugaritic texts, even though it seems obvious in retrospect that if the art of Ugarit is related to the text of Homer, the epics found at Ugarit ought to be still more directly related to the epics of Homer. The long delay in recognizing this important fact was due to the circumstances that Semiticists, and not Classicists [Gordon was uncommonly both], deciphered and interpreted the Ugaritic tablets. Those Semiticists were admirably equipped for pointing out biblical parallels, but most of them were unconcerned about the Greek side of the problem.
The scribes of Ugarit required an educational system to train them from the bottom up. The simplest school texts found there are ABC tablets listing the letters of the local alphabet in their fixed, invariable order. The Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two letters is derived from the longer Ugaritic ABC of thirty letters. Contrary to the strict alphabetic principle, the last three letters of the Ugaritic ABC are appendages so that twenty-seven remain for our consideration. Five sounds in the repertoire of twenty-seven came to converge with other sounds because of soundshifts in standard Phoenician. The remarkable fact is that when those five sounds are eliminated, the remaining twenty-two letters appear at Ugarit in precisely the same order as they are still preserved in the Hebrew alphabet. The traditional order of the Greek alphabet reflects its Phoenician origin. The Latin ABC is only a step further removed. Accordingly, whole blocks of letters (such as j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t) appear in the same fixed order in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. When an extra letter appears in Ugaritic (as in l, m, d, n) the order of the letters that survive into Hebrew is always the same (for the Ugaritic d is one of the five letters rendered unnecessary by the soundshifts mentioned above.
It stands to reason that the community that provides us with the most primary form of the ABC so far discovered should be of exceptional importance for the study of the cultures associated with the development and use of the ABC in the East Mediterranean. Aegean influences contributed to the Ugaritic ABC. Then the Ugaritic ABC gave rise to the Phoenician-Hebrew ABC, which in turn was borrowed by the Greeks. The centrality of Ugarit in the basic elements of East Mediterranean culture impresses itself on us again and again.
Ugarit was a city in the hands of a West Semitic community. By water, it joined Western Asia to the Mediterranean. It lay between the Hittite Empire and Canaan. It had enclaves of Assyrians, Hurrians, Hittites, Egyptians, Aegean folk and other foreigners. The polyglot nature of the community is mirrored in the vocabulary texts, whereby the scribal students learned to translate Ugaritic words into Sumerian, Akkadian and Hurrian. The two main scripts were the Akkadian syllabary and the Ugaritic alphabet: both written in cuneiform with a stylus on clay. The normal language for business, law, and diplomacy was Akkadian; the normal language for religion, literature, and local administration was Ugaritic. Hurrian was also used not infrequently for rituals and incantations. A few tablets in Cypro-Minoan attest the intimate connections with Cyprus, Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphs round out the repertoire of scripts found at Ugarit.
The Ugaritic tablets come from the Amarna and Ramesside Ages (ca. 14th-12th centuries B.C.) in which the traditions of both the Hebrew Patriarchs and the Trojan War are rooted. More that any other excavated site, Ugarit was the meeting place Semite and Indo-European; a cosmopolitan city where a literature was produced reflecting the varied heritages of the component parts of the population. Ugaritic literature, therefore, anticipates basic aspects of the earliest Hebrew and Greek literatures, providing a historic backdrop for both, as we shall bring out later in this chapter.
The poetry of Ugarit is so close to Hebrew poetry that it has cleared up a mystery of long standing. It used to be thought that classical Hebrew was linguistically the creation of "primitive" Hebrew tribesmen, and that it was a sort of miracle for such tribesmen to produce a polished literature from the very start. It turns out that the Hebrews found in Canaan a highly polished literary medium, now attested by the Ugaritic myths and epics. The distinctive contribution of the Hebrews is the content of the Bible rather than the literary medium which they found waiting for them upon their advent in Canaan. In the Old testament, the Hebrews never call their language "Hebrew" or "Israelite," but quite correctly "the language of Canaan."
End of excerpt Part 1
Ugarit is of unique importance for reconstructing the origins of Western Civilisation. The reason is reflected in the nature of the discovery that called attention to the site in 1928. A Mycenaean tomb in the vicinity of a Semitic port meant that the area was one in which the people of Canaan and the Aegean had commingled. The archaeological finds at Ugarit brought this out quite clearly, and comparative archaeologists soon used those finds for studies of Mycenaean civilisation embracing Crete, the Peleponnesus and other parts of the Greek sphere. The late Miss H. L. Lorimer, in her notable book, Homer and the Monuments (London, 1950), went further: she drew heavily on the archaeological finds at Ugarit for illuminating problems arising from the text of Homer. However, she did not make a single reference to any of the Ugaritic texts, even though it seems obvious in retrospect that if the art of Ugarit is related to the text of Homer, the epics found at Ugarit ought to be still more directly related to the epics of Homer. The long delay in recognizing this important fact was due to the circumstances that Semiticists, and not Classicists [Gordon was uncommonly both], deciphered and interpreted the Ugaritic tablets. Those Semiticists were admirably equipped for pointing out biblical parallels, but most of them were unconcerned about the Greek side of the problem.
The scribes of Ugarit required an educational system to train them from the bottom up. The simplest school texts found there are ABC tablets listing the letters of the local alphabet in their fixed, invariable order. The Phoenician alphabet of twenty-two letters is derived from the longer Ugaritic ABC of thirty letters. Contrary to the strict alphabetic principle, the last three letters of the Ugaritic ABC are appendages so that twenty-seven remain for our consideration. Five sounds in the repertoire of twenty-seven came to converge with other sounds because of soundshifts in standard Phoenician. The remarkable fact is that when those five sounds are eliminated, the remaining twenty-two letters appear at Ugarit in precisely the same order as they are still preserved in the Hebrew alphabet. The traditional order of the Greek alphabet reflects its Phoenician origin. The Latin ABC is only a step further removed. Accordingly, whole blocks of letters (such as j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t) appear in the same fixed order in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. When an extra letter appears in Ugaritic (as in l, m, d, n) the order of the letters that survive into Hebrew is always the same (for the Ugaritic d is one of the five letters rendered unnecessary by the soundshifts mentioned above.
It stands to reason that the community that provides us with the most primary form of the ABC so far discovered should be of exceptional importance for the study of the cultures associated with the development and use of the ABC in the East Mediterranean. Aegean influences contributed to the Ugaritic ABC. Then the Ugaritic ABC gave rise to the Phoenician-Hebrew ABC, which in turn was borrowed by the Greeks. The centrality of Ugarit in the basic elements of East Mediterranean culture impresses itself on us again and again.
Ugarit was a city in the hands of a West Semitic community. By water, it joined Western Asia to the Mediterranean. It lay between the Hittite Empire and Canaan. It had enclaves of Assyrians, Hurrians, Hittites, Egyptians, Aegean folk and other foreigners. The polyglot nature of the community is mirrored in the vocabulary texts, whereby the scribal students learned to translate Ugaritic words into Sumerian, Akkadian and Hurrian. The two main scripts were the Akkadian syllabary and the Ugaritic alphabet: both written in cuneiform with a stylus on clay. The normal language for business, law, and diplomacy was Akkadian; the normal language for religion, literature, and local administration was Ugaritic. Hurrian was also used not infrequently for rituals and incantations. A few tablets in Cypro-Minoan attest the intimate connections with Cyprus, Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphs round out the repertoire of scripts found at Ugarit.
The Ugaritic tablets come from the Amarna and Ramesside Ages (ca. 14th-12th centuries B.C.) in which the traditions of both the Hebrew Patriarchs and the Trojan War are rooted. More that any other excavated site, Ugarit was the meeting place Semite and Indo-European; a cosmopolitan city where a literature was produced reflecting the varied heritages of the component parts of the population. Ugaritic literature, therefore, anticipates basic aspects of the earliest Hebrew and Greek literatures, providing a historic backdrop for both, as we shall bring out later in this chapter.
The poetry of Ugarit is so close to Hebrew poetry that it has cleared up a mystery of long standing. It used to be thought that classical Hebrew was linguistically the creation of "primitive" Hebrew tribesmen, and that it was a sort of miracle for such tribesmen to produce a polished literature from the very start. It turns out that the Hebrews found in Canaan a highly polished literary medium, now attested by the Ugaritic myths and epics. The distinctive contribution of the Hebrews is the content of the Bible rather than the literary medium which they found waiting for them upon their advent in Canaan. In the Old testament, the Hebrews never call their language "Hebrew" or "Israelite," but quite correctly "the language of Canaan."
End of excerpt Part 1
It should be noted that Gordon is writing long before the later archaeologists, such as Finkelstein have shown that the Hebrews and Israelites of the OT were indeed Canaanites. That had later been converted through various means, and that there is no evidence for the enslaved sojourn in Egypt and subsequent Exodus, - as recorded at least. Therefore, the import of the last paragraph above is that the redactors of the Hebrew 'Bible' were able to make use of pre-existing texts, themes and motifs that were already long existing and polished - just as was the case for the Greeks.