Economic And Commercial Connections Of Ugarit And Its Merchants

Ugarit was clearly an international entrepôt, with ships of many nations arriving in the harbor of Minet el-Beida.

It was was a vassal of the Hittites from the 2nd half of the 14th century onward, after Suppiluliuma conquered the area, ca. 1350–1340 BC. Texts at the site, found in the various archives, most of which date to the last half century of the city’s existence, document connections between Ugarit and numerous other polities both large and small, including Egypt, Cyprus, Assyria, the Hittites, Carchemish, Tyre, Beirut, Amurru, and Mari. Most recently, the Aegean has been added to this list as well.

The tablets mention the exportation from Ugarit of perishable goods, including dyed wool, linen garments, oil, lead, copper, and bronze objects, especially to the Assyrians, located far to the east in Mesopotamia, as well as extensive trade connections with Beirut, Tyre, and Sidon on the Phoenician coast.

Objects imported from the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia have been found at Ugarit itself, including Mycenaean vessels, a bronze sword inscribed with the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah, hundreds of fragments of alabaster jars, and other luxury items.8 These, and other more mundane goods, such as wine, olive oil, and wheat, reached Ugarit through the efforts of merchants like Sinaranu, whom we met earlier in these pages, whose ship went to Crete and back during the midfourteenth century BC. We know that the Ugaritians were sufficiently well-off financially to send the Hittites tribute each year, consisting of five hundred shekels of gold, dyed wool, and garments, in addition to gold and silver cups for the Hittite king, queen, and high officials.

The “House of Yabninu” located near the southern part of the royal palace had some tablets.

• It was 1,000 square meters, so Yabninu must have been a reasonably successful merchant Yabninu.

The sixty or more tablets that were discovered within the ruins of this house are thought to have originally been kept on the second floor, and include documents written in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and the as-yetundeciphered language known as Cypro-Minoan, chiefly used on the island of Cyprus but also found inscribed on vessels at Tiryns on the Greek mainland.

The House of Rapanu was excavated in 1956 and 1958. The tablets, more than two hundred of them, were quickly studied and then published a decade later, in 1968. They indicate that Rapanu was a scribe and high-ranking adviser to the king of Ugarit, most likely Ammistamru II (ca. 1260–1235 BC).

Rapanu was apparently involved in some sensitive negotiations at the highest levels, as the contents of the archive indicate. The texts include a number of letters exchanged between the king of Ugarit and the king of Cyprus (Alashiya), written at the time that the Sea Peoples threatened both. There are also letters exchanged with the king of nearby Carchemish and with the more-distant Egyptian pharaoh; the latter set are concerned with some sort of incident involving Canaanites on the Levantine coast.

One of the letters deals with trade in oil between Ugarit and Cyprus. It is from Niqmaddu III, the penultimate king of Ugarit, and was sent to the king of Alashiya, whom he calls his “father,” referring to himself as “your son.”

Unless the Ugaritic king had married a Cypriot princess, which is not out of the question, it seems that the use of the word “father” follows the general terminology of the time in attempting to establish a familial relationship, while at the same time acknowledging either the superiority or the relative age of the king of Cyprus over the king of Ugarit. Another of the letters in this house has already been mentioned: the one describing the coming of enemy ships to Ugarit, which Schaeffer thought had been found in a kiln, being baked before its dispatch to the king of Cyprus. We will discuss this text further below.

Some of the most recently discovered tablets are those in the so-called House of Urtenu. This residence was initially uncovered by accident in the southern part of the site during the construction of a modern military bunker in 1973. The archaeologists were allowed to dig through the spoil heap created by the digging of the bunker, which incidentally destroyed the center of the house, and found a number of tablets, all of which have now been published. The newer tablets have come from the careful excavations of 1986–1992, which have also been published, and of 1994–2002, which are currently being studied. Overall, there are more than 500 tablets in this archive—134 were found in 1994 alone—with some texts written in Ugaritic but the majority in Akkadian. The correspondence includes letters from the kings of Egypt, Cyprus, Hatti, Assyria, Carchemish, Sidon, Beirut, and possibly Tyre.14 One of the oldest was apparently sent by a king of Assyria, probably Tukulti-Ninurta I, to a king of Ugarit, perhaps Ammistamru II or Ibirana, and concerns the battle in which Tukulti-Ninurta and the Assyrians defeated Tudhaliya IV and the Hittites.

As one of the excavators has pointed out, the tablets indicate that Urtenu was active at the beginning of the twelfth century BC, and that he had a high social status. He was apparently an agent in a large commercial firm run by the queen’s son-in-law, which had commercial dealings with the city of Emar in inland Syria, as well as with nearby Carchemish. He was also involved in negotiations and trade deals with the island of Cyprus, among other long-distance trade ventures.16 In fact, the five letters found in the house that were sent from Cyprus are extremely important, for they include—for the first time ever—the name of a king of Bronze Age Cyprus: a man known as Kushmeshusha. There are two letters from this king, as well as two letters from senior governors of the island and, intriguingly, a letter from an Ugaritic scribe who was actually living in Cyprus at the time. These five letters now join the other four from Alashiya that had previously been found in Rapanu’s house.17

There are two additional letters in the house that contain references to two “Hiyawa-men,” who were reportedly waiting in the Lukka lands (later known as Lycia), in southwestern Anatolia, for a ship to arrive from Ugarit. The letters were sent to Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, by a Hittite king, probably to be identified as Suppiluliuma II, and one of his top officials. These are the first known references to Aegean people in the Ugarit archives, for “Hiyawa” is undoubtedly related to the Hittite word “Ahhiyawa,” which, as we have seen, is taken by most scholars to mean the Mycenaeans and the Bronze Age Aegean.

There is also a letter from Pharaoh Merneptah of Egypt, responding to a request from the king of Ugarit—either Niqmaddu III or Ammurapi—for a sculptor to be sent, so that a statue of the pharaoh could be created and set up in the city, specifically in front of a temple to Baal. At the same time as the pharaoh denies this request in the letter, he gives a long list of luxury goods that were being sent from Egypt to Ugarit. The goods were being loaded onto a ship destined for Ugarit, he said, and included more than a hundred textiles and pieces of clothing, plus assorted other goods such as ebony wood and plaques of red, white, and blue stones.19 Again, we should note that almost all of these goods are perishable and will not have survived in the archaeological record. It is a good thing that they are mentioned in this text, therefore; otherwise we might never have known that they once existed and were exchanged between Egypt and Ugarit.

Another letter in this archive is from a messenger/representative named Zu-Aštarti, discussing the ship on which he had sailed from Ugarit. He states that he was detained en route.

Some scholars have wondered whether he had perhaps even been kidnapped, but he writes only: “On the sixth day I was at sea. As a wind took me, I reached the territory of Sidon. From Sidon to the territory of Ušnatu it bore me, and in Ušnatu I am held up. May my brother know this…. Say to the king: ‘If they have received the horses which the king gave to the messenger of the land of Alashiya, then a colleague of the messenger will come to you. May they give those horses into his hand.’ ”

It is not completely clear why he was “held up” in Ušnatu or even why the letter is in Urtenu’s archives, though it is possible that horse trading was a state-protected industry in Ugarit at that time. A contemporary letter from the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV to Ammistamru II, found in Rapanu’s house, states that the Ugarit king must not allow horses to be exported to Egypt by Hittite or Egyptian messengers/merchants.21