Led by Attenu-purullenu
About this course
A short undergraduate course on the working argument of František Válek's 2024 paper Divination and Political Administration at Ugarit (Axis Mundi 18:2). The argument is that divination — extispicy from sacrificed-animal entrails, teratomancy from malformed births, astromancy from celestial phenomena, and the use of compendia to interpret all three — was the state-of-the-art political decision-making technology of the Late Bronze Age, not superstition. Kings did not blindly follow oracles, but they were obliged to consider them; oracles forced reflective deliberation on decisions that would otherwise have been made by intuition alone.
The course is taught by the Ugaritic court itself. Attenu-purullenu, high priest of Baal and umbrella host, opens with the political setting that conditioned the divinatory apparatus, then takes you through the ANE comparative framework and the working assemblage from the House of the Hurrian Priest. The Egyptian Envoy walks you through the fire-damaged ivory archive of the Royal Palace and what its inscriptions might once have said. Ilimilku the court scribe handles the compendia, the astromancy, and the apotropaic ritual. Ammurapi closes the course with his final letters as the city burned — the form held inside the emergency, the divinatory warnings the lung model may have recorded, and the help that did not arrive.
The reading is Válek 2024. You will be asked to engage with the cited Ugaritic texts (KTU 1.103, 1.127, 1.141, 1.163, 6.84, and others) and with the comparative material (the Mari Protocol for Diviners, ARM XXVI no.1; the šumma immeru compendia from Hattusa and Emar). You will not need the cuneiform itself. You will need to think about how a state-of-the-art technology can leave a record this fragmentary and still be reconstructible.
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Led by Attenu-purullenu
The question
The setting that produced the surviving record. Attenu-purullenu walks you through Ugarit's geographic and political position on the Syrian coast — caught between Egypt, Hatti, Mycenae, and Babylon — and the alliance Niqmaddu II made with Suppiluliuma I that pulled the kingdom out of Egypt's shadow and into the Hittite sphere. The cosmopolitan court (archives in seven languages, scribes inventing a thirty-sign alphabet) and the 70-year window from c.1255 to 1185 BCE in which most of what we know about Ugaritic divination was actually written down.
Outcome
You can locate Ugarit in geography and chronology, name the four power-blocs around it, explain the Hittite-alliance bargain and what it cost, and account for why the last 70 years of the city's existence are the best-documented Late Bronze Age site in Syria. (Setting and source-richness)
Sub-units
Led by Attenu-purullenu
The question
The comparative framework Válek uses to read fragmentary Ugaritic evidence. Attenu-purullenu walks you through the Mari Protocol for Diviners (ARM XXVI no.1, Zimri-Lim, c.1780–1758 BCE) — which explicitly obliges diviners to report all observations to the king and to keep secrets from anyone else. Stefan Maul's argument that extispicy was state-of-the-art technology rather than superstition: oracles forced reflective deliberation, and their function was to make policy-makers reconsider plans that an exceptional sign rendered exceptionally important. The *šumma immeru* compendia from Hattusa and Emar attest the wider professional apparatus.
Outcome
You can cite the Mari Protocol for Diviners and articulate Maul's argument that oracular practice forced reflective deliberation rather than replacing it, and you can name the *šumma immeru* tradition as evidence for the ANE divinatory profession's continuity. (Comparative framework)
Sub-units
Led by Attenu-purullenu
The question
The clay assemblage at the eastern edge of the tell. Attenu-purullenu walks you through five inscribed clay liver models, one inscribed clay lung, and seventeen uninscribed liver models from the structure properly designated *Maison du Prêtre aux Modèles de Foies et de Poumon Inscrits*. You read KTU 1.141 — the actual case of Agaptarri who wanted to purchase a young man from Cyprus, an ostensibly private extispicy that may have fed state intelligence — and KTU 1.127, the unique multi-inscription lung model containing the line "if the city is about to be seized," tentatively connected by del Olmo Lete to the approaching end of Ugarit.
Outcome
You can describe the Hurrian Priest house assemblage in detail, read KTU 1.141 in its political-intelligence dimension, and explain the lung model's unique features and the speculative case for connecting it to Ugarit's final years. (Working divinatory record)
Sub-units
Led by The Egyptian Envoy
The question
The harder corpus. The Egyptian Envoy walks you through the Southwestern Archive of the Royal Palace — over sixty ivory divinatory models, forty-seven of them inscribed, all gravely damaged by the fire that destroyed the city. KTU 6.84 mentions Egypt and may relate to international affairs. The use of ivory and (in at least one case) gold foil marks these objects as high-prestige in a way no other ANE divinatory model is. You confront the open questions Válek poses: who carved them, were they fresh divinations or palace copies of clay reports, was the prestige material ritual or display? The methodological problem is inferring practice from a materially-rich but textually-poor record.
Outcome
You can describe the Royal Palace ivory corpus, explain why KTU 6.84 is the best-preserved inscription and what it suggests about diplomatic divination, and articulate the methodological problem of reasoning about practice from a fragmentary material record. (Material evidence under fragmentary inscription)
Sub-units
Led by Ilimilku
The question
The textual apparatus that supported the practice. Ilimilku walks you through the four Ugaritic divinatory compendia (KTU 1.103 on malformed animal foetuses, 1.140 on malformed human foetuses, 1.86 possibly on dream omens, 1.163 on lunar omens from Ras Ibn-Hani), the ten-plus Mesopotamian Akkadian compendia found across the city's archives, and KTU 1.78 — the controversial six-line text that may record a solar eclipse over Ugarit (one of ten such eclipses observable during the Ugaritic-script period). The *namburbî* apotropaic rituals to avert calamity once an omen had been received: known at Ugarit through one fragmentary Akkadian compendium (RS 92.2018).
Outcome
You can cite the four Ugaritic compendia and identify each subject, explain how the Akkadian compendia attest scribal education in the divinatory tradition, and describe the *namburbî* apotropaic ritual as the procedure for averting an announced calamity. (Textual apparatus and astromantic specifics)
Sub-units
Led by Ammurapi
The question
The capstone. Ammurapi reads with you his final letters to the king of Alashiya as enemy ships appeared off the coast — written in correct diplomatic protocol while the army was in Hatti and the fleet in Lukka. The unsent letter found in the kiln where it had been set to dry. You consider whether the lung model's "if the city is about to be seized" could plausibly be a divinatory record from this final phase, what divination could and could not tell the court, and what the court could do with what divination told it. Válek's tentative connection is honestly tentative; you decide for or against it on the available evidence. The course closes on the limits of state-of-the-art Bronze Age decision-making technology.
Outcome
You can read Ammurapi's final letters in their political-administrative register, evaluate Válek's tentative connection between the lung model's inscription and the city's actual end, and articulate the relationship between divinatory warning and the limits of available state action. (Capstone — interpretive judgement)
Sub-units