Friday, November 4, 2005
2005-2006/023
U. of I. religion professor to speak Nov. 11 about
his work interpreting ancient Canaanite tablets
Wayne Pitard, Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will give a lecture entitled, "The Ancient Canaanite Myth of Baal: Writing a Commentary," on Friday, Nov. 11, at noon, in Room 2090B in the Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, on the U. of I. campus.
Over the past two years, the speaker has been working with a colleague from New York University on preparing the first full-length commentary on one of the most important literary works from the ancient Near East, “The Baal Cycle,” one of the few surviving narrative poems from the ancient Canaanite culture (ca. 1200 BCE).
This six-tablet text tells the story of how the great fertility/storm god Baal (well-known from the Hebrew Bible) became the leading god of the Canaanite pantheon. The tablets themselves were badly damaged when the city of Ugarit, Syria, where they were found, was destroyed ca. 1180 BCE.
Scholars have been working on these texts since their discovery in the 1930s, but until now no full-scale attempt to deal in detail with every line of preserved text has been published. The speaker will discuss some of the major developments in interpretation of the tablets that have emerged during his work on the commentary.
Pitard's presentation is the second in a new Works in Progress Series of talks sponsored by the Program for the Study of Religion. The program's purpose is to provide a vehicle for receiving reaction to work in progress by the program's faculty and others with an interest in the academic study of religion. Presenters will give a brief account of a project they are currently working on, leaving time for questions and comments from the audience.
Pitard’s primary areas of research are (1) the history of ancient Syria and its political and cultural relationship with Israel; (2) concepts of death and afterlife in ancient Syria-Palestine; and (3) the production of a new image-based, digital edition of the ancient Canaanite texts from the city of Ugarit, Syria, entitled The Ugaritic Tablets Digital Edition.
He teaches courses on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Archaeology and the Bible, and the religions and cultures of the ancient Near East.
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