ROYAL LAND GRANTS FROM UGARIT

The royal land grants from Ugarit are conveyances of property rights from the kings of Ugarit to designated individuals. The texts were discovered in excavations of the royal palace of Ugarit (Ras Shamra, Syria) and date to the last part of the Syrian Bronze Age. They are written in Akkadian except for two texts which are written in Ugaritic. The study addresses the role of the land grants in the society of Ugarit. While earlier studies had often characterized Ugaritian society as feudal, later studies have suggested a bimorphic structure comprised of an agrarian village economy and a palatine superstructure which exploited the village economy and controlled the trade and manufacturing of the kingdom. According to this view, the exploitation of the village economy by the palatine sector led to serious social and economic dislocations. The resulting collapse in the village economy was one factor in the collapse of Late Bronze civilization. This study largely corroborates that view but indicates that the dislocations within the village sector were later than had previously been thought. The land grants from the reign of Niqmaddu II (ca. 1370-1340 BCE) portray an agrarian kingdom with a viable village social and economic base. The grants from the reign of Ammistamru II (ca. 1260-1230 BCE) indicate that serious dislocations in the village society had taken place and that the kingdom had accommodated a new class of urban landowners. The social analysis in the study is based on a diachronic structural analysis of the texts. The texts have been arranged in a hierarchy of important features. The most important feature is the heritability of the grant. Heritability correlates with recipients from the free sector of society; non-heritability, with recipients from the palatine sector. A second feature of analytical importance is the nature of the obligation entailed by the grant. The study includes transcriptions and translations of all the texts with notes on individual problems and readings. In addition, there is a paradigmatic analysis of the features of the land-grant documents and discussion of the relationship of these features to the society of Ugarit.