Tablet Listing the Officials of a Temple
Unknown · Late Bronze Age II, circa 1400 to 1200 BC
A fragment of a clay tablet, thirteen centimetres wide but only five high, inscribed in the Ugaritic alphabet with a list of names. The museum's record and the Commons title identify it as a roll of the personnel of a temple, the men who served a sanctuary of Ugarit. Look at how the entries are arranged in short lines, one name after another, sometimes with a father's name or a title. Unlike the myths on the tablets beside it, this is an administrative document, and its plain layout tells you immediately that it was made for use rather than for reading aloud.
The tablet was excavated on the acropolis of Ras Shamra in nineteen thirty-six, during the eighth campaign of the French mission, and came to the Louvre in the division of finds with Syria. The archives of Ugarit contain hundreds of such lists: of workers, of soldiers, of villages liable for taxes, of goods received and issued. Together they reveal a kingdom run by a literate bureaucracy that used the same alphabet for poetry and paperwork. The sanctuaries of Baal and Dagan on the acropolis were institutions with staff, budgets and records.
Did You Know? The same thirty-letter alphabet served Ugarit's scribes for both the myths of Baal and the payroll of his temple.
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