Tablet from the Baal Cycle (AO 16636)
Unknown · Late Bronze Age II, circa 1400 to 1200 BC
A large clay tablet, twenty-seven centimetres high, its face ruled into columns of alphabetic cuneiform. The text is part of the Baal Cycle, the great poem of Ugarit that tells how the storm god Baal wins kingship over the gods, defeats the sea god Yam, builds his palace on Mount Sapan and is finally swallowed by Death, Mot, before returning to life. Look at the columns and the neat wedge-shaped signs written with the thirty-letter alphabet of Ugarit; this is literature, not accounts, and it was copied with care.
The tablet was found in the house of the High Priest on the acropolis of Ras Shamra, between the temples of Baal and Dagan, where the French excavations of the early nineteen thirties uncovered the library that held the city's myths. It came to the Louvre in the division of finds with Syria. The Baal Cycle survives on a series of tablets, of which the Louvre holds several displayed in this room, and their discovery transformed the understanding of Canaanite religion and of the world behind the Hebrew Bible. A scribe named Ilimilku is named in the colophons of the cycle as its copyist, working under the high priest Attanu.
Did You Know? The scribe Ilimilku signed his copies of the Baal poems, making him one of the few named authors of Bronze Age literature.
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