Ugaritic Narrative Poetry

This is the Society of Biblical Literature's standard scholarly edition of the Ugaritic literary corpus, with named specialist translators, Mark S. Smith among them, working directly from the cuneiform alphabetic tablets excavated at Ras Shamra rather than through a secondhand paraphrase, and that direct philological method is the edition's real evidentiary basis. It is the standard English rendering scholars cite for the Baal Cycle, the Kirta epic and the Aqhat epic specifically because of that documented translation method and the Society's own editorial vetting. Use it for the content of these Ugaritic narrative texts as this edition translates them; a claim resting on a disputed reading of a damaged tablet needs the specialist Ugaritic philological literature addressed directly, since even a careful translation cannot resolve every gap in the surviving material.