Tablet with the Birth of the Gracious and Beautiful Gods
Unknown · Late Bronze Age II, circa 1400 to 1200 BC
A clay tablet almost twenty centimetres high, incomplete but still carrying a substantial text in Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform. Its subject is the birth of the gracious and beautiful gods: the poem tells how the supreme god El seduces two women on the seashore and fathers the twin deities of dawn and dusk, Shahar and Shalim, whose hunger is so vast that they devour everything they can reach. Look for the horizontal lines dividing the text into sections; the museum classes it as a myth combined with an incantation, and the ruled sections seem to mark ritual instructions inserted between the narrative.
The tablet was found in room one of the house of the High Priest on the acropolis of Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, during the second campaign of the French excavations in nineteen thirty, and came to the Louvre in the division of finds with Syria. It is one of the strangest texts from the site, mixing mythology, ritual and sexual comedy, and it has been read as the script of a festival celebrating the first fruits or the vine. It is a precious witness to how myths were performed rather than merely told.
Did You Know? The newborn gods of this poem are so hungry that one lip reaches the earth and the other the sky as they swallow everything in between.
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