It is here suggested that the Kirta legend represents an intellectual engagement with sacral kingship, interrogating the nature, conditions, and effects of the monarchy as a major institution in divine-human affairs. Since its publication in 1936, the Ugaritic legend of Kirta has elicited a great variety of interpretations. In the Ugaritic texts one finds a sufficient number of similarities to biblical cultic practices to remove any doubt regarding the basic relatedness of the two ritual systems, but enough differences to allow the conclusion that the separation in time and space must not be overlooked when considering the relationships between the peoples who observed these systems. Akkadian texts provide data on such practices among neighboring peoples: from Emar on the Euphrates come a significant number of texts dating to roughly the same period as the Ugaritic texts from Mari, also on the Euphrates, a series of texts several centuries older and from Ebla, just south of Aleppo, texts more than a millennium older. These texts date for the most part to the last few decades of the Late Bronze Age, ca. Some eighty Ugaritic texts provide almost the only written evidence-in a WestSemitic language and from a period pre-dating the Hebrew Bible-regarding ritual and divinatory practice in the Levantine area.
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