Canaanite

El presides and Baal contends. That division of labour is the structural signature of the Ugaritic material, and it is why the Canaanite pantheon reads so differently from the Greek despite both having a king at the top.

El is the father, the creator of creatures, aged and benevolent and slow, who sits at the source of the two rivers and whose assent is required. The assembly of the gods is his household, and the sons of El, said to number seventy, are its members. He does not fight.

Baal does. The Baal Cycle is an extended account of a god acquiring kingship rather than inheriting it: he defeats Yam, the sea, and is proclaimed king; he demands and is granted a palace; he is then swallowed by Mot, death, and the world dries out until his sister Anat destroys Mot and he returns. The kingship of the storm is won, lost and regained, and its rhythm is the rhythm of the agricultural year.

The roster is bounded in a way many pantheons are not. Seventy sons of El and Athirat is a stated figure, and the pantheon lists recovered from Ugarit are formal enumerations used in cult.

The royal dead had standing. The rapiuma are addressed in the texts as a company of the departed with a continuing role, and the king who joined them was joining something already constituted.

Before 1929 the Canaanites were known chiefly through their enemies. The Hebrew Bible polemicises against Baal and Asherah at length, and Greek writers preserved a late and heavily reworked account. Neither is a description of the religion on its own terms.

Then a farmer at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast struck a tomb, and excavation uncovered the archives of Ugarit: a Late Bronze Age city with a scribal quarter, writing an alphabetic cuneiform in a Northwest Semitic language closely related to Hebrew. The Baal Cycle, Kirta and Aqhat came out of it, along with ritual texts, pantheon lists, offering records and letters. A religion that had been visible only in caricature became readable in its own words within a single generation of scholarship.

The limits are real. Ugarit is one city, at the northern edge of the Canaanite world, and its archive dates to a few centuries before that world ended. Extending Ugaritic evidence southward to Iron Age Canaan or to Phoenicia is an inference, not a reading.

The tablets themselves are damaged, the poetic vocabulary is difficult, and the order of some tablets in the Baal Cycle is disputed, so translations differ on more than style.

For the later Phoenician and Punic phases the evidence shifts back to inscriptions, dedications and classical testimony, and the picture thins again.