The documents discovered exhibit great
variety: diplomatic, legal, economic, administrative, scholastic,
literary and religious texts. Twenty tablets have likewise yielded us a
set of mythological poems of great poetic beauty. Older than the Iliad
and the Odyssey, they must henceforth be numbered among the most ancient
literary monuments known today.
It remains to be seen what the 325 tablets discovered during excavations
at the entrance to the ancient town in May 1994 will reveal. For the
time being they are illegible. After intensive cleaning, they will be
"freed" of the layer of calcite they are coated in at the moment.
Epigraphists will then decipher these archives and in a few months will
be able to tell us what role was played by Ugarit (queen of the
Mediterranean), whose name was noticed in a text discovered in Mari in
the eighteenth century B.C.
Even so the site is not very evocative for the unschooled visitor. It
needs the eyes of an expert to pick a way through the labyrinth of
stones three-quarters buried beneath the brambles and the thistles
cropping up through the bumpy surface of the immense mound. Furthermore,
at every step one could easily break one’s neck in the ground-level
openings to funeral vaults, the entrance stairways of which have very
often disappeared.
The town, built on a natural hill, was girdled about with defenses. A
fortified postern gave access to it, and this structure, though it faces
the present car-park and has been reproduced time again in photographs
and postcards, may go unnoticed by many visitors, who, without the
slightest ill will, may well mistake it for a gully-hole.. What an
astonishing piece of architecture this vaulted passage is, however,
built in a zigzag, opening out on to ditches where the frogs croak, with
arched section following the line of the 45? slope that served as the
glacis of the citadel. The remains of a tower show the defensive purpose
of these buildings.
Whether you make way into the town through the old postern or, more
simply, by the path leading to the house of the keeper and seller of
entrance tickets, you all the same end up on a path overgrown with brush
wood, which corresponds to the main street.
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