Ugarit, the Bronze Age City of Splendor

Knowing how the story was going to end, the video was making me get sadder and sadder. Ugarit is a city that has always sparked special feelings me, due mostly to the sad final letters. Thank you for covering this city in one of your great videos!

The farmer is outstanding in his field

Im Syrian and Im from latakia the city near ugarit thank you so much for telling our stories and history for me ugarit has a very special place in my heart and I feel very connected to this place every time I go there.. but that’s so sad the most of artifacts of Ugarit are now in France!! Rather to be in its original land !

A most engaging presentation for a layman such as myself. Thank you.

I have been enjoying your quotations from the Amarna Letters as well as the archives in Ugarit. My studens once described this correspondence as clay-mail. Keep up your excellent work and many thanks!

i wonder who "the master of shipwrecks" was

How beautiful and rich of culture it's My country Syria 🥺❤️ May it stay in the shadow of Baal , Bilshmin and Ishtar 🙏

A beautiful place, I would focus on masonry details 🎥, great history! Unfortunately, Syria is currently unavailable. Thanks for another great video!<3

I'm inclined to think that "the Sea Peoples" are very much the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. You mention an overdependence on Hatti in your video, but it's also worth noticing that Ugarit's kings were reluctant and at worst rebellious vassals who were constantly reprimanded for evading their responsibilities -- and of course, at the same time, the Hittite kings were facing their own problems with the collapsing empire. At the same time, we have strong evidence of a complex society living essentially hand-to-mouth and relying on grain imports from Egypt even in regular times, and increasingly pressured by famine (insert Kaniewski's controversial data on aridification and climate change around 3.2ka BP here). This seems to cause a bit of a vicious cycle where poor harvests and the loss of productive farmland leads to increased urbanisation (Yon talks about how buildings were repeatedly subdivided to make more, smaller dwellings during Ugarit's final phase), less production, and disaffected Ugarites being reduced to apiru-style brigandage (which is described in a lot of letters over the course of some 50+ years). In that light, I wouldn't hesitate to take Eshuwara at his word when he claims that a significant portion of the "Sea Peoples" then active between Cyprus and the Levantine Coast were either from the area of Ugarit or had their bases there. I'm thinking less "invasion" and more "gradual erosion through long-term coastal and land-based raiding combined with an influx of displaced persons from Europe".

Wonderful wholly overlooked significant bronze age city: archeology magazine had a recent article on ugarit; you're a better bronze age voyager than Odysseus! Thanks, be safe!

Ugarit is a great reminder that all things fall and are forgotten Yet, its hidden memory endured and eventually re emerged from the field like the farmer's crops. Thanks to it we know so much about Canaan, its religion, the origin of the modern western language and even about cultures even more ancient like the Hurrians. The himn to Nikkal is genuinely breath taking and the Baal cycle is incredible because of the biblical connection. It caused my fascination with the levant. Wich is why this year I am gonna make a comic book about the canaanite gods' reaction to the israelites arrival to canaan and the fall of Jerico.

Just a little note: The Ugaritic writing system is more of "Abjadic" than "Alphabetic". A term typically used for scripts that focus on consonants (related to the nature of the language itself being based on roots of consonants, typically 3-letter) such as Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew.

Thank you for yet another excellent episode. I think it's remarkable that we still have so many well-preserved documents and letters from this period. It's nice to hear so many personal accounts in addition to more formal proclamations and such. God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)

Great video as always! I could tell Ugarit has been long time in the making! Well done 💯

Man, you are an absolute treasure to the lay historian interested in ancient mediterranean history. There are few on YouTube who can put together such a coherent and absorbable narrative about this era. I have nothing to say really, other than that. Cheers! You are making the world a better place for at least a few of us.

I've been interested in Ugarit for some time but i've never heard of Amishtamuru. She sounds like an interesting character! Great video as always Cy. Thanks for your work ❤✌

Great. Interesting content. Thanks for your YouTube video efforts.

Ugarit also shows us the few mythical tales of the Semitic gods that we know of, such as the Ba'al cycle. I hope you will cover some mythology in the future!

Once again I’m behind on your videos! I always love videos about these incredibly ancient civilizations!

Underrated channel, awesome work