Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
a tower, one of several bastions built by the Crusaders. There are several quite large cisterns
for water storage and some stables just next to a massive keep that overlooks the ditch.
The keep has walls of 5 metres thick and it covers an area of nearly 24 square metres. Fur-
ther on is the gate where the drawbridge once ventured out across the chasm. A Byzantine
citadel was located at the centre of the fortress, with a Crusader church adjoining one of
two Byzantine chapels. The Arabs added a mosque and a palace which includes baths with
courtyards. In effect, this site was crowded with what was left from a number of dynasties.
The castle is believed to have been built by the Phoenicians during the first millennium BC
and surrendered to Alexander the Great about 334 BC. Little is known about its history un-
til the Byzantines in the 10
th
Century, when some of the initial defensive structures were
built. It then fell into the hands of the Crusaders and, at the time, it is evident that much
of what could be seen today was already in place. The Crusader walls were eventually
breached by the armies of Saladin in 1188, and it is from this victory that the castle takes
its present name.
Some archaeologists working at the site were excavating the base of what they had identi-
fied as one of the internal gateways.
We headed west toward the coast and Ugarit, the source of a number of the antiquities in
the National Museum in Damascus, including the small tablet identified as the first known
alphabet. I already mentioned the beauty of the figurines and statues that had been found at
the site, but unfortunately the site itself is somewhat desultory.
Although now a little distant from the sea, Ugarit was an ancient cosmopolitan port city
with trade and diplomatic links to Egypt and other surroundings countries. However, its
location was forgotten until 1928 when a peasant accidentally opened an old tomb while
plowing a field.
Excavations have since revealed an important city with a prehistory reaching back to 6000
BC.
The excavations uncovered a royal palace of 90 rooms laid out around eight enclosed court-
yards, many ambitious private dwellings, including two private libraries that contained dip-
lomatic, legal, economic, administrative, scholastic, literary and religious texts. Crowning
the hill where the city was built were two main temples.
On excavation of the site, several deposits of cuneiform clay tablets were found, constitut-
ing a palace library, a temple library and, apparently unique in the world at the time, two
private libraries; all dating from the last phase of Ugarit, around 1200 BC. Further excav-
ations discovered further libraries of tablets. The most recent of these occurred in 1994.
