In the spring of 1928, a Syrian farmer's plough struck the corbelled roof of a Late Bronze Age tomb at Ras Shamra, on the Mediterranean coast eight miles north of Latakia. Claude F. A. Schaeffer's French expedition began the following year and continued for decades. The mound proved to be Ugarit — a major Bronze Age port-city destroyed around 1180 BC in the upheavals of the Sea Peoples and never rebuilt. From the palace, the temples of Baal and Dagan, and several private archives came roughly 1,500 cuneiform tablets in a previously unknown alphabetic script — the first true alphabetic cuneiform anywhere in the ancient Near East. Charles Virolleaud produced the initial decipherment within months; the texts have appeared in the Le Palais royal d'Ugarit series and the Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit (KTU) corpus. The mythological tablets — the Baal Cycle, the Aqhat epic, the Kirta epic — record in long poetic narratives the religious world of Late Bronze Canaan: El the patriarchal high god, Baal the storm-rider, his sister-consort Anat, the goddess Asherah, the sea-god Yam, and Mot the god of death. The pantheon and its idiom were, until 1929, known only through the polemical descriptions in the Hebrew Bible. Now they could be heard in their own voice. The contrasts the prophets draw — Baal versus YHWH on Carmel, the felling of Asherah poles, the war on the high places — gain their full historical depth against the texts the Canaanite priesthood was actually using. The poetic parallels are striking: formulaic word-pairs, parallelism, divine epithets, and even shared phrases reappear across Ugaritic and Hebrew verse. Mark Smith and Frank Moore Cross have shown that Hebrew poetry inherits its prosodic technique from this wider Northwest Semitic tradition while bending it to a radically different theology. Psalm 29's storm theophany reads like a transposition of a Baal hymn into the worship of YHWH. The main archive is held in the National Museum of Damascus, with significant fragments in the Louvre. Sources: Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford, 2001); Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard, 1973); Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz, Joaquín Sanmartín, eds., Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit (KTU³) (Ugarit-Verlag, 2013); 1 Kings 18:20–40.
Discovered in 1929, the Ugaritic tablets supply the first direct textual evidence of Canaanite religion as it was actually practiced in the Late Bronze Age, giving scholars a concrete linguistic and mythological framework against which the Hebrew Bible's polemics, poetic formulas, and divine epithets can be precisely measured.