RAS SH AMU A— HARRIS 4g5 



THE POPULATION OF UGARIT 



Several races and cultures were represented at Ugarit. The chief 

 element, at least from the third millennium, was the Semitic Canaan- 

 ite, as may be seen from the pottery, the language of most of the 

 tablets, the majority of personal names and neighboring place names 

 recorded in the tablets. 



Of the other peoples, the Cyprians must have been prominent in 

 the port settlement, as appears from the archeological evidence. An 

 enigmatic text from Ugarit mentions Alasiyans (Cyprians), Hittites, 

 Hurrians, and other peoples. And among the personal names, and 

 the names of places from which various persons are said to have come, 

 we have many which are not Semitic, 



Next to the Canaanite, the most important group seems to have 

 been the Hurrian. The Hurrians were, during the second millennium, 

 a widespread people. Hurrian texts and names are found during the 

 middle of that millennium in the neighborhood of Assyria, in Asia 

 Minor, in Syria, and Palestine. We know neither the extent of their 

 spread nor what peoples and languages were comprised in them, but we 

 know their influence was great. The "Hittite" culture of North Syria 

 (called Hatti land by the Assyrians) was in all probabiHty Hurrian, 

 being quite different from that of the Hittite center in Asia Minor. 

 The Hurrians were an important element in the population of Palestine- 

 Syria. The Horites of the Bible were shown by Professor Speiser to 

 have been Hurrians,^ and quite a number of the early Palestinian 

 tribal and personal names mentioned in the Bible are Hurrian; e. g., 

 Kenaz, the Perizzi, the names in Genesis 36: 20 ff., such as Dishan 

 (Hurrian Taishenni). In Ras Shamra there are many Hurrian names; 

 in one letter all the people involved are Hurrians, although they use 

 the Semitic language, just as the Hurrians of Nuzi \ised the Semitic 

 Assyrian. 



Ras Shamra has also yielded a syllabary (sign dictionary) in Sumer- 

 ian and Hurrian (to teach cuneiform writing to Hurrian scribes?), and 

 several texts in the Ugaritic alphabet. Although our knowledge of 

 Hurrian is limited, we know it is this language because of formal 

 similarities with the language of the famous Mitanni letter (of Tush- 

 ratta, king of the Hurrian land Mitanni, to the Pharaoh of Egypt) and 

 with the related language of certain of the tablets found at the Hittite 

 capital Boghazkoi in Asia Minor. The Sumerian-Hurrian syllabary, 

 interpreted by Professor Thureau-Dangin, has been of great value in 

 telling us more of the structure of the language, and in identifying the 

 meaning of some of the suffixes and words. Although this language is 

 related to the other Hurrian dialects of which we know, it may con- 



' Speiser, E. A., Mesopotamlan origins, pp. 131 fl.; Ethnic movements in the Near East In the second 

 millenium B. C, Annual Amer. Schools Oriental Res., 1933. 



