Before 1929, Canaanite religion was known almost entirely at second hand, through the polemical descriptions preserved in the Hebrew Bible and scattered references in Greek and other outside sources, all written by people who considered Baal worship a rival faith to be condemned rather than a system to be described accurately. That changed when French archaeologists excavating Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast, uncovered the ruins of Ugarit, a Late Bronze Age city destroyed and abandoned around 1200 BCE, and with it a scribal archive of clay tablets written in a previously unknown cuneiform alphabetic script. Deciphered soon after discovery, the Ugaritic tablets turned out to preserve the first substantial body of Canaanite religious literature in the culture's own words, the Baal Cycle chief among it.
The tablets themselves are damaged, broken in places and not laid out with certain sequence numbers, so the order scholars now read the cycle in, Baal versus Yam, then the palace, then Baal versus Mot, is a reconstruction built from internal narrative logic and comparison across the surviving fragments rather than a sequence stated outright by the tablets. One tablet colophon names a scribe, Ilimilku, and a reigning Ugaritic king, giving the text a firmer material date, roughly the thirteenth century BCE for that particular copy, even though the traditions it records may well be older than the tablets that preserve them. This atlas records the cycle as anonymous composition transmitted through Ilimilku's scribal hand, since nothing in the tablets themselves credits the poems' actual composition to a single author.