The Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places, 2d ed.

• Author: Parker, Simon B.

The first edition of this work (M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, J. Sanmartin, Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, pt. 1: Transkription,(1) Alter Orient und Altes Testament 24 [Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, 1976]) was a comprehensive transcription of all Ugaritic texts discovered and published through 1971. Introduced as KTU, it replaced rapidly the previously comprehensive UT (C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook, Analecta Orientalia 38 [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965]) and, more gradually, CTA, A. Herdner's careful reedition of the texts discovered in the first ten years of the site's excavation (Corpus des tablettes en cundiformes alphabetiques, Missions de Ras Shamra 10, 2 vols. [Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1963]). The latter remained valuable for its epigraphic comments, as KTU was criticized for being less than meticulous in all its readings.

Since the publication of KTU, numerous other Ugaritic texts have come to light at Ras Shamra; at the neighboring, coastal site of Ras Ibn Hani; and at other sites in Syria and on Cyprus. Further, increasingly meticulous epigraphic work has been done on both new and old texts, especially by D. Pardee and P. Bordreuil and by several scholars working from the macrophotographic record being built up by West Semitic Research (B. Zuckerman and collaborators). Since, moreover, KTU is now out of print, it had become highly desirable to have a new, comprehensive collection of Ugaritic texts, using new collations and editions where possible.

The first work to attempt to meet that need was J.-L. Cunchillos and J.-P. Vita, Banco de Datos Filologicos Semiticos Noroccidentales, Primera parte: Datos Ugariticos, I: Textos Ugariticos (Madrid: CSIS, Instituto de Filologia, 1993),(2) which reproduced the Ugaritic texts as found in KTU, adding the new texts according to the numbering system of KTU (each number now preceded by 00.), and appending lists of differing readings after each text (01. for the first collator, 02. for the second, etc.). It presented texts in KTU's first category (literary and religious) in four separate groupings (mythic, epic, ritual, and hippiatric) and added a category excluded by KTU: Ugaritic words in vocabulary lists (but not in Akkadian prose texts), to which it assigned the initial number 00.9. While thus including some Ugaritic words in syllabic cuneiform, it excluded, on the one hand, Hurrian texts and sections of texts in alphabetic cuneiform and, on the other, Akkadian (or...