Fragment of a Tablet from the Baal Cycle (AO 16640)
Unknown · Late Bronze Age II, fourteenth to thirteenth century BC
An incomplete tablet, twelve centimetres high, inscribed in the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit with lines from the myth of Baal. The surface carries the traces of a story in which gods argue, fight and build: the cycle that follows the storm god from his struggle with the sea to his death and return. Look at the break lines and the joins; the museum's record notes that a further fragment was once attached and that the join is probably mistaken, a glimpse of the painstaking work of piecing together a shattered library.
The tablet came from the house of the High Priest on the acropolis of Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, and was excavated during the third campaign of the French mission, in nineteen thirty-one. It reached the Louvre in the division of finds with Syria. The Baal Cycle is the longest literary text from the Canaanite world, written in a language close to Hebrew and in a poetic style of parallel lines that the Psalms would later share. Every fragment, even a damaged one like this, helps fill gaps in a poem that scholars are still reconstructing line by line.
Did You Know? Ugaritic poetry uses the same parallel-line structure as the biblical Psalms, so reading Baal's story feels oddly familiar.
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