Ugaritic Ritual and Pantheon Texts
Ugarit's cult required its gods to be listed in a fixed order and its offerings scheduled and quantified, and these lists are the record by which the city organized its relationship to the divine.
- fixed hierarchical ordering of deities
- prescriptive sacrifice: species, quantity, and occasion specified
- the primary evidence for reconstructing the Ugaritic pantheon
- cult calendar and temple bookkeeping rather than narrative
A modern grouping of the tablets that record Ugarit's sacrificial cult rather than its myths: god-lists such as KTU 1.47 and its Akkadian counterpart RS 20.24, which fix a canonical order of deities headed by El and Dagan, and ritual texts such as KTU 1.40, 1.41, 1.87, and 1.148, which prescribe sacrifices, quantities, and occasions across the ritual calendar. These are the working documents of the temple: who receives what offering, in what sequence, at what point in the year. Modern scholars reconstruct the structure of the Ugaritic pantheon and cult almost entirely from this corpus, since it is more systematic than the mythic narratives, which mention gods incidentally rather than ranking them.
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