The builders of the palace of Ugarit designed and constructed the building in at least four stages between the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. The last phase of the palace’s life, before its destruction at the fall of the city, demonstrates how its designers employed the latest Bronze Age innovations to create a perfect royal residence – as well as a practical royal court and centre of international diplomacy.

 

 The Palace Complex: An Overview

 

The palace of Ugarit covers an area of 6500 square metres, consisting at ground floor level of a series of interconnecting rooms and courtyards. It is this area of the palace that corresponds with its final phase of construction.

The ground floor was the centre of the palace’s business. Here, court officials received visitors and conducted the local and international bureaucratic business of Ugarit.  However, the area also has the remains of twelve stairways leading upwards – an indication the palace had at least one further floor. These upper areas, away from the busy public spaces below, most probably formed the royal family’s living accommodation.

 

The Palace Defenses

 

Builders constructed the last incarnation of the palace from stone instead of the clay bricks common elsewhere in the Levant during the 15th Century BC. This more durable choice of building material was just one part of a sophisticated and formidable set of redesigned defences designed to protect the palace.

Builders constructed five metre-thick walls, using earth mounds from a previous phase of the palace. Workers smoothed the mounds off to a 45-degree angle and covered them in seamless stone facing. The result was a smooth, impenetrable surface that was an effective deterrent to potential invaders.

Towers clustered around the palace’s western entrance complimented the walls. Visitors entering by this route would have been aware of the tight security around this potential chink in the palace’s defensive armour. The gateway led into a narrow, closely guarded portico, designed to restrict movement before entering the palace proper.

The passage then opened onto a specially designed reception courtyard, equipped with stone benches. This area was just a hinterland. The deep grooves carved into the courtyard paving remain; the only evidence of the great doors that separated the courtyard from the palace of Ugarit proper.

 

 

Bronze Age Innovations in Design and Construction

 

The design of the interior of the palace illustrates Ugarit’s willingness to absorb the knowledge and traditions of the cultures with which it was trading.  Royal architects created a light, airy interior with a series of courtyards, pools and internal gardens. These inner gardens formed the focal point for the various groups of rooms. This arrangement echoed palace design from Minoan Crete.

Foreign technological advances complimented these borrowed architectural features. A network of pipes running through the palace is all that remains of the sophisticated plumbing system. Great cisterns supplied the public and private zones of the palace with water, while other pipes drained away the palace’s sewage.

 

 The Layout of the Public Rooms

 

In all, the ground floor rooms were arranged into five courts and four mini-courts. These courts all served various civic and administrative functions. Today, the main bureaucratic areas of the palace of Ugarit are still clearly defined by the remaining archaeology.

To the south was the throne room, which was directly connected to the palace archives and the central bureaucratic courtyard. The Bureaucratic Courtyard overshadowed the throne room, in both size and design. For although the King might receive state visitors in the throne room, the bureaucratic courtyard, was the centre of the palace’s political life. It was here that scribes produced much of Ugarit’s diplomatic correspondence and commercial and political documentation. It was the nerve centre of Ugarit’s government.

So, it was only logical that the palace archive should be nearby. Archaeologists have identified the room in question by the remains of records of judicial records and reports from the outlying district still found in situ. They have even found practice attempts of reports made by trainee scribes.

One particular group of tablets are particularly poignant. Archaeologist’s discovered them in what was believed to have been an oven in the southern court. Initially, they assumed that this was where the palace records were baked for permanent preservation-and that the texts found within dated to the very day of the palace’s destruction.  However, experts now believe that, while the records do still date from the end of the palace’s life, they fell through into the southern court from the floor of an upper storey as the palace burned.

 

 

The Palace Gardens and Royal Burial Chambers

 

However, not all of the ground floor was given over to public use and business. Archaeologists have identified one area that would have been exclusively for the use of the royal family and their intimate guests: the sizeable interior palace garden. Here, a series of shady verandas, adorned with ivory garden furniture formed a private place of relaxation.

The costly materials for the garden furniture were undoubtedly imported, and a sign that Ugarit’s royalty could afford the best, but archaeologists believe that artisans may have produced the furniture within the palace.

A small room leading off from the garden contained a variety of these pieces, suggesting this small workshop catered for repairs, if not the actual manufacture of the royal family’s garden luxuries.

Finally, as was traditional in Ugarit, excavators discovered the palace necropolis underneath the ground floor of the palace, under two rooms in the northern sector. The necropolis consisted of three large burial chambers in all, each stone lined with corbelled vaults.

 From gardens to plumbing, and archives to royal burial chambers, Ugarit architects kept all the needs of royalty in mind. Even in the most private and luxurious of contexts, the designers planned the palace of Ugarit to be self-sufficient and practical.

 

Sources

Ugarit: History and Archaeology by Jamal Hassan Haydar

Monuments of Syria: A Historical Guide by Ross Burns. I. B Tauris Publishers. London: New York.1999.

Charles Gates, 2003. Ancient cities: The archaeology of urban life in the ancient near east and Egypt, Greece and Rome. Routledge