Ancestral Veneration and the Settlement History of Tell Sūkās

Abstract

Scholarship of the Bronze-to-Iron Age transition in the northern Levantine littoral has traditionally stressed a major disjuncture in settlement and societal development c. 1200 BCE, concurrent with the destruction and abandonment of the Ugaritic capital at Ras Shamra. Based upon a reinterpretation of the archaeological remains at Tell Sūkās, this study argues for a degree of regional continuity in cultural lineage from the mid-second to early first millennium BCE, based upon the proposed identification of a previously unknown example of ancestral veneration.