A Manual of Ugaritic

Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee's A Manual of Ugaritic, published by Eisenbrauns in 2009, is the standard modern teaching grammar and reference for the Ugaritic language, written by two of the field's leading epigraphers, Pardee a longtime editor of the Ras Shamra tablets and Bordreuil a senior figure in Ugaritic and Northwest Semitic epigraphy. Its strength is direct authorial access to the primary tablet corpus and the manual's use as a standard teaching text in Near Eastern studies programs. Its limit is that Ugaritic religious texts, the Baal Cycle and related myths chief among them, survive as damaged tablets with real gaps and disputed readings, so a specific mythological or ritual claim drawn from Ugaritic material should be checked against the tablet edition and translation literature rather than the grammar alone, which teaches the language rather than interpreting the religion.