First Voices · Room II · Ugarit (Ras Shamra), Syria

c. 1400–1200 BCE — the Baal Cycle tablets

The passage — verbatim lines as carried in the vault source record (trans. Smith & Pitard)

“Baal is dead!”

— the mourning cry of El and Anat, KTU 1.5–1.6

“mightiest Baal lives, the prince, lord of the earth, exists”

— the proclamation after El's dream-vision, KTU 1.6 iii

Between the two cries — paraphrase after Smith & Pitard: Baal descends into the gullet of Mot, Death, and dies. El and Anat perform the mourning rites. Anat seizes Mot and splits, winnows, burns, grinds, and sows him like grain. Then El dreams the heavens raining oil and the wadis running with honey — and knows that Baal lives.

Original script: Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform. No transliteration is carried in the vault record, so none is shown.

What these people were asking for — emic · interpretive

That Death not keep him. On that coast, drought is Mot winning — and the mourning of El and Anat, then the shout that the storm-rider lives, ask the same thing every farmer below the citadel asked: that the rains come back, that the dry season not be forever.

Etic record. Edition: Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Vol. I (Brill, 1994); Smith & Pitard, Vol. II (Brill, 2009) · tablets c. 1400–1200 BCE, Ugarit — the city's destruction c. 1185 BCE gives a hard terminus · evidence class 2-text · caveat: tablet order is partly reconstructed and key passages around Baal's revival are broken — the mechanism of his return is lost · colophons name the scribe Ilimilku under King Niqmaddu · backdrop: placeholder vault illustration.
source record · motif: the dying-rising god

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