Musical Practices and Instruments in Late Bronze Age Ugarit (Syria)

The Levantine kingdom of Ugarit, destroyed by the Sea Peoples ca. 1185, provides a wide range of evidence for the reconstruction of musical practice during the Late Bronze Age, at the time of New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Kassite Babylonia and the Amorite kingdoms of Syria and Palestine. Cultural associations with the eastern Mediterranean world may also be derived from it. Dated to the last centuries of the second millennium BCE, the evidence from Ugarit casts some light upon the poorly known history of ancient Near Eastern music in the span of time between third-millennium Sumer and the world of the Bible in the first millennium. The temptation to look for continuity or rupture over such a long period and across such a large geographic space, while difficult to resist, is open to frustration.