Westward, the Mountains, and Ugarit
After a night in Aleppo, we caught a shared taxi to Idlib, a small town about halfway between Aleppo and the Mediterranean Coast. The guidebook contains no entry for Idlib, so we had no idea what to expect. Idlib gave us three surprises. First, the museum is amazing. For a museum in a small town, it does a fantastic job of displaying the Ebla material – everything is well labelled, in English and Arabic, and they have complete reconstructions of the archive room. Second, the people of Idlib are obviously not used to seeing blond women. We nearly caused a riot in a shared-taxi station when we tried to negotiate a ride and the young men in the station saw Nora. Third, if a price sounds too good, it usually is. Nora and I made a foolish mistake while negotiating with a driver that cost us about $30 more than we expected – not a major setback, but a foolish mistake nonetheless.

The mountains of western Syria are such a sharp contrast to the steppe and deserts of the east that you can hardly believe you are in the same country. You drive over winding roads that dangle you precariously close to deep valleys before finally delivering you to the coast. The air changes driving westward, filling with water, and after mountainous ridges, the brush changes to trees and then forests. Long, narrow valleys meander between these ranges – one can almost see the Assyrian armies marching through those corridors in their annual campaigns down the coast.

Lattakia is the major city of the Syrian coast. It was only a minor port for much of history but took on much greater significance following the formation of modern Syria. Because of its ties to the Mediterranean, Lattakia is much more outward facing than the rest of the country. Culturally, Lattakia is a very different place from the rest of Syria: much fewer women wear headscarves or veils, men may even wear the occasional tank top, and the signs in storefronts feature a variety of languages including Greek and Turkish. Nora informed me that a great number of Saudi families maintain homes in the area and move north for the summer as well. We did not spent much time in the city however, and just used it as a jumping point to make our way to the nearby sites and then southward.

For me, the primary reason to come to the region was Ugarit. Ancient Ugarit shares many things with modern Lattakia and during its height - 800 years after the height of Ebla’s influence - Ugarit was probably the most important commercial centre in the world. The city is famous for its monumental palace architecture, its sculpted ivories, and the correspondences it shared with the Pharaoh in Egypt and the Hittite king (in Turkey), but it is probably most well known for the invention of an alphabetic cuneiform script. Although there is little evidence that this script inspired the more widely distributed Phoenician and Aramaic scripts, the Ugaritic “alphabet” is the oldest one known in the world. Finally, I have a personal affection for this ancient city because I wrote a paper about it as an undergraduate that became a contributing reason I chose this field of study.

Unfortunately, we were on a tighter schedule than I would have preferred, so I was not able to wander the entire site extensively but I was able to examine the four major locations within the site. The site itself has been poorly maintained. Many regions of the site, even reconstructed regions, have become overgrown, and the educational signs are difficult to find and have faded or rusted heavily. I was disappointed by how little remained of the monumental structures on the acropolis but I was pleased by how well preserved the masonry in the royal palace was. The entire layout of the royal quarters of the city was clearly identifiable. I was really surprised by the city’s distance from the coast. In the Bronze Age, Ugarit was a coastal city, and although we were near the coast in a cartographical sense, I certainly would not want to haul goods regularly over such a distance. Leaving Ugarit, I did not feel the sense of awe that I had felt at Ebla. I also realized that I know much less about the archaeology of sites this far away from Bablyonia (southern Iraq), but I was still very pleased to have visited the ruins. I think it will take more reading before I am able to embrace fully what I saw there… reading, and time.