Il Libro dei morti dell'antica Ugarit: Le piu antiche testimonianze sull'Aldila prima della Bibbia.

• Author: Rowe, Ignacio Marquez
• Position: Review

Il Libro dei morti dell'antica Ugarit: Le piu antiche testimonianze sull'Aldila prima della Bibbia. By MASSIMO BALDACCI. Casale Monferrato: EDIZIONI PIEMME, 1998. Pp. 222, illustrations.

For those unfamiliar with the corpus of cuneiform texts found at Ras Shamra, one preliminary warning: there is no Book of the Dead, nor anything similar, from ancient Ugarit. With his title Massimo Baldacci assumes, as he explains in his introduction, that the reader will understand by it "the views of the Netherworld and afterlife" and allusions thereto "in the religious beliefs of the people who lived in the regions of ancient Syria and ancient Palestine" (pp. 7f.). This is indeed what the present book is about, the second in the smart series published by Piemme dedicated to Ugarit. (The first, by the same author, is La scoperta di Ugarit: La citta-stato ai primordi della Bibbia, 1996.)

Relevant allusions, however, are not numerous, and come from texts that belong to different genres. As pointed out by Baldacci himself (p. 153, n. 21), we have no "specific textual typology within the whole Canaanite religion that deals with the Netherworld, such as we find, for example, in Egypt. There are found no guidebooks (with precious illustrations) such as the Book of Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns or, again, the Book of the Dead. As J. Bottero puts it in dealing with the mythology of death in ancient Mesopotamia, we have no single "Treatise on Death and the Underworld" ("La Mythologie de la mort en Mesopotamie ancienne," in Death in Mesopotamia, ed. B. Alster [Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1980], 26f.). Instead, we can only adduce a few scattered and, more often than not, fragmentary references, occasional scraps of an ensemble which, to be sure, was neither unitary nor coherent. In the world of ideas, contradictions seem to be the rule. But, still following Bottero's reasoning, the modern scholar's only choice is to piece together scanty data to recreate a "system" that can only partially (if not incorrectly) reflect the original vision of things.

Baldacci attempts to describe the "system" of Death and the Netherworld at ancient Ugarit not only on the basis of the textual material (basically Ugaritic rituals, myths, "para-myths" [to use D. Pardee's term], and legends) but also on that of the important archaeological sources. Thus, the death of Ba[subset]lu through Motu's throat and his revival, the Rapa[contains]uma or spirits of the dead and the...