Ritual and Cult at Ugarit

The Ugaritic ritual texts provide the only extensive documentary data for Late Bronze cultic practice in the greater Syro-Palestinian region. These texts, in a West Semitic language that belongs to the same family as Hebrew and Aramaic, reflect the actual practice of a sacrificial cult in the city of Ugarit in the late twelfth–early eleventh centuries B.C.E. Based on new collations of the tablets, the texts and translations offered here provide ready access to this direct witness to the form taken by one of the predecessors of the biblical scarificial cult. These texts will give readers an idea of the everday contacts between the Ugaritians and their deities.