Stemming from the author's doctoral dissertation (University of Chicago, 2018), this volume illuminates the origins of the Late Bronze Age (LB) polity of Ugarit, especially as it emerged from the civilizational changes at the start of Middle Bronze. Buck argues that Late Bronze Age Ugarit originated as one of several Amorite kingdoms that diffused in Syria in the second millennium bce.
Chapter 1 surveys theories of Ugarit's origins, focusing on the competing hypotheses that it derives from a Canaanite or Amorite background. To contribute to the debate, Buck proposes a historical linguistic approach to assess the filiation of LB Ugaritic alongside archaeological comparison to contextualize Ugaritic material culture among other, roughly contemporary, assemblages. She details the background to the (re-)emergence of Ugarit after the Early Bronze Age (EB) in chapter 2, with a history of scholarship on the question of middle bronze age re-urbanization, favouring a hybrid model of exogenous and endogenous explanations. She also reviews the debate on the linguistic classification of Ugaritic, establishing her commitment to the use of shared innovations alone for linguistic subgrouping, which requires attention also to historical circumstance. Chapter 3 continues the introductory material by defining the terms “Canaanite”, “Amorite”, and “Ugaritic”, briefly tracing their ancient usage and circumscribing their geographical boundaries. “Canaan” in LB documents was treated as a political entity with a well-defined territory distinct from Ugarit. “Canaanite” was not used as an ethnic term among peoples of Canaan, in contrast to “Amorite”, which is defined by a kin-based affiliation known in the MB Syrian kingdoms of Mari, Qaṭna, and Yamḫad. Here, Buck also elaborates on the linguistic corpora, emphasizing that our knowledge of Amorite derives entirely from personal names. She proposes advancing our understanding of Amorite and its relevance to classifying Ugaritic by seeking to differentiate a western dialect of Amorite, confining her study to Amorite names attested in MB Yamḫad and Qaṭna, yielding a corpus of approximately 850 names deriving primarily from Tuttul and Alalaḫ. This evidence comprises a “language group” that Buck calls “Western Amorite”.
In chapters 4 and 5, Buck shifts from background to analysis. Chapter 4 aims to determine whether any other material assemblages resemble that of MBIIb–LBI Ugarit. Buck isolates five features (“fortifications, palace organizational system, migdāl temple construction, glyptic evidence, and … the ritual use of donkeys” (p. 117)) and maps their distribution. Only Alalaḫ shares all five features; Mari, Ebla, Qaṭna, Hazor, and Megiddo attest four. Buck argues that these overlaps are best explained by migration – most likely of Amorites, since some comparable sites have explicit Amorite identity, some Ugaritic myths may allude to Amorite heritage, and (anticipating the next chapter) the Ugaritic language demonstrates affinity with Amorite.
In chapter 5, Buck aims to show that by isolating “Western Amorite”, the affiliation of Ugaritic with Amorite can be more clearly appreciated. She reviews at length the placement of each as Central and Northwest Semitic before demonstrating their incompatibility with the two known subbranches of Northwest Semitic: Aramaic and Canaanite. The key innovations of Proto-Canaanite (quttil/quttul D-stem suffix conjugation; the Canaanite Shift; first person suffix conjugation in -ti; and the generalization of suffixed -nū for all first common plural forms) are already observable in Amarna Canaanite; Ugaritic's contemporary lack of those innovations demonstrates its divergence. “Western Amorite” lacks evidence to compare with three of the four Canaanite innovations, though it is clear that the Canaanite Shift was not in effect, making it unlikely that “Western Amorite” is Canaanite either. Finally, Buck isolates six features of “Western Amorite” that could illuminate its relationship to Ugaritic, five of which are unproductive or inconclusive for classification. A single feature is treated as a diagnostic shared innovation: the consonantal inventory of “Western Amorite” and Ugaritic, which both preserve the same Proto-Semitic consonants, sharing the “innovative loss” of /ɬ/ and /ɬˀ/ (merged with /s1/ and /ṣ/, respectively) in the Bronze Age (as opposed to the Canaanite languages’ gradual loss of them in the Iron Age). Buck cautiously proposes a third subfamily of Northwest Semitic, which she calls “Proto-Western Amorite”, containing Ugaritic and Western Amorite as branches.
In a brief conclusion, Buck asserts that the most likely background for LB Ugarit is the migration of Amorites during the reurbanization at the beginning of MB. Buck avoids characterizing this as an ethnic identification, treating it instead as a political affiliation that helps define the social organization of the site. In two appendices, Buck provides the corpus of personal names that comprise her “Western Amorite” dialect and a lexicon of terms contained therein.
Among the most significant contributions is Buck's dialectology of Amorite, which she rightly notes is too expansive a category. And while her dialectology is undertaken with due caution, readers may question its success, based as it is on onomastic evidence, which may not reliably reflect spoken language. Moreover, as a framework, the delimitation of the evidence based on predetermined period and geography, rather than solely on shared dialectical features themselves, risks weighting the outcome in favour of affinity with proximate Ugarit and could call into question the existence of the dialect. As Buck notes, the evidence from Tuttul, which constitutes one-third of the “Western Amorite” corpus, often diverges from that of Alalaḫ. Buck characterizes this divergence as inconsistency in the spread of dialectical features, but given the limited nature of the evidence such variation might equally suggest caution in grouping these corpora as a dialect.
A question of framework also arises from the archaeological comparison. Buck establishes a material assemblage she says is “not exhaustive” but includes “five key elements”. Yet there is no clear explanation of the criteria used to select the features (and exclude others), or defence of what makes the selected features “key”. Buck elaborates on methodology throughout the book; a similarly thorough methodological defence on this crucial step would be welcome.
Overall, Buck has provided a useful volume for studying the MB archaeological evidence from Ugarit, Syrian Amorite onomastics, and the classification of Ugaritic. The author does an admirable job of maximizing the use of limited data. Buck's study offers important directions for further discussion of the origins of LB Ugarit and Amorite dialectology.
