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Conspectus Librorum - Book Review:


    Marguerite YON,  The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra.  Eisenbrauns. Winona Lake, IN. 2006.
    ISBN-13: 978-1-57506-029-3.  Cloth viii + 188 pages

    Price: 31,05 USD

    Orders:
    Eisenbrauns
    Winona Lake, Indiana
    USA
    Order: www.eisenbrauns.com


    This long awaited translation of Marguerite Yon's already "classical" guide to Ugarit where she directed excavations from 1978 to 1998, will come as a huge relief to all students uneasy with the French language. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, maps and drawings  (readers will particularly appreciate O. Callot's axonometric reconstructions), this brilliant introduction to one of the key-sites of Syrian archaeology and human history tout court (pardon my French), is a real "must have" for academic classrooms, libraries and anyone with a keen interest in the past. Both the author and the editor merit our heartfelt thanks for the many updates in the new English version.

    The latest information (2005) on the recently discovered Minet el-Beida tomb 1008, a new list of divinized kings RS 94.2518 along with some bibliographical references complement a first chapter dealing with geography and history (pp. 9-26). A second chapter representing the bulk of this work (pp. 27-122), can be used both as a companion to strolls in situ, if not for an armchair Grand Tour of the Tell.  Here again, useful bilbiographical updates have been added to the appropriate sections, which is likely to convince those already in possession of Yon's original publication to invest in the one on hand as well. The third and final chapter is devoted to artefacts excavated at Ugarit which shed more light on official and everyday life, with a generous amount of colour photographs illustrating the more spectacular finds (pp. 123-172). Following are a selected bibliography (pp. 173-174) and indexes (sites and structures, concordance of RS excavation numbers with text figures and Museum inventory numbers) on pp. 175-179.  To conclude, we entirely agree with the summary on the back cover qualifying this volume as "the authoritative latest word on the data from the site and their meaning for our understanding of the importance of ancient Ugarit".

    Eric Gubel
Conspectus Librorum