Located on the Syrian coast, the site of Ras Shamra is one of the Levant's iconic heritage sites. The
archaeological mission of Ras Shamra-Ugarit, a joint Syrian-French effort since 1999, is the oldest
French mission in the Near East and Ugarit is one of the longest-running excavations of French
archaeology overseas. Since 2014, research has been overseen by Valerie Matoïan and Khozama Al-Bahloul.
Work is undertaken under the auspices of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums of
Syria (DGAMS) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA, France). With forty members
(researchers, faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, PhD students), the mission's research
activities are undertaken within the scope of numerous collaborations, both national and international.
The city of Ugarit is the capital of a Levantine kingdom of the same name, known in the Eastern
archives of the Bronze Age. Its exceptional location favoured the development of this prosperous
merchant state, with several port facilities, at a crossroads of trade and cultural exchanges between the
Hittite and Egyptian Empires and between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.
For the Late Bronze Age, the urban fabric of Ugarit is one of the best known in the Levant. The city's
last phase of occupation, spanning the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BC, has been
particularly well studied and today we have a good understanding of this Mediterranean capital,
including its residential areas (organized in blocks), part of the acropolis, where two great city temples
are located, and a vast palace area, in the northwest and served by one of the city gates.
Some 5000 tablets have been excavated at the site. Some of the texts are written in the local language,
Ugaritic (a Semitic language), transcribed by an alphabet written with cuneiform signs. Ras Shamra-
Ugarit has yielded the only significant corpus composed of texts written in cuneiform alphabet. The
scribes of Ugarit also used logo-syllabic cuneiform and the Accadian language, which was the
international and diplomatic language of the time. This corpus, which also includes Hittite, Hurrian,
Egyptian and Cypro-Minoan texts, tells us about many aspects of administrative, political, economic,
intellectual and religious life in the kingdom from the fourteenth to twelfth centuries BC.
The excavation of the site has also yielded a considerable number of artefacts of various materials,
produced either locally or imported. These include objects of everyday life, luxury items, ritual
objects, etc., whose study contributes to our understanding of the cultural identity of this kingdom and
its inhabitants. The findings make Ugarit a reference site for the study of urban and palatial
civilization for the Bronze Age of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. Although many of the
texts found in the city have made it into press, more than 50% of the archaeological material remains
unpublished. Publishing this material is one of the mission's priorities and is key to better
understanding this civilization in the absence of field excavations.
The publication project is directed by Valérie Matoïan.