The Pillars of Hercules

Two or three miles north of the city was Ras Shamrah. It had been an unimportant village until, in 1928, a farmer plowing on a nearby hill bumped his plow blade against the top edge of a symmetrical wall, buried in the ground. Further digging revealed it to be the wall of a large building, a palace in fact, and in time the foundations of an entire city were uncovered, thirty-six hectares of a royal town which was dug up in stages throughout the 1930s. That sort of discovery—even the detail of the plow blade—had happened many times before in the Middle East (and it was also a poor farmer in China who—with a hoe—found the terra-cotta warriors at Xian); peasant plowmen were probably the world’s first archaeologists. But Ugarit yielded a real treasure in the form of small beadlike clay tablets on which was inscribed the precursor of the alphabet I am using now. (Guidebook: “The writing on the tablets is widely accepted as being the earliest known alphabet. It was adapted by the Greeks, then the Romans, and it is from this script that all alphabets are derived.”) There were trinkets, too, bracelets and beads and spear points and knives; but the implications of the tablets the shape and size of a child’s finger bone were that this might be the earliest examples of human jotting.

Ali the caretaker apologized before charging me four dollars in Syrian piastres—it was almost his week’s pay—to look at the ruins. And he followed me, pointing to the crumbled walls and weedy plots, saying, “Palace … Library … Well … Aqueduct … Flight of stairs … House … Archway … Stables … Mausoleum …”

It was no more than a mute ground plan, spread over several hills, where with their narrow hooves balanced on the flinty walls goats cropped grass and pretty poppies grew wild. Having been excavated, it had been so neglected it was becoming overgrown, with rubble obscuring many of the walls; no pathways, no signs, no indication at all of what had been what. Ugarit (“once the greatest city in the entire Mediterranean”) was turning back into a buried city. It had been looted of all its trinkets and artifacts—they were on display in the Damascus Museum.

I liked being here alone, and felt it was all a throwback to an earlier time on the Mediterranean shore, when a traveler might stumble upon an ancient site and be shown around by a simple soul who lived nearby. The temples and villas of rural Italy, and Carthage and Pompeii and the ancient marble structures of Greece, had once been treated like this—just crumbling curiosities, where goats and sheep sheltered. Every so often a peasant would raid them for building blocks or marble slabs. That was definitely a feature of the Mediterranean—the temples turned into churches, the churches into ruins, the ruins buried until they became quarries for anyone who wanted to build a hut. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—we have the evidence of splendid engravings—Greece and Italy looked just like Ugarit did today, the ruins were novelties, broken cellars and fallen walls and stairs leading nowhere and tombs robbed of their artifacts and bones.

Sitting on a wall to admire it—the sun on the flowers and the grass that grew higher than the ruins—I was approached by Ali again.

“Alphabet there!” he said.

He pointed to a small enclosure, where in a shady muddy corner in a clump of weeds, the tablets had been found. It was as though it was sacred ground. In a sense it had been hallowed, by printed words, some of the first in this hemisphere. Five thousand years had passed since then. And here, in Syria, the very place that had given the world this elegant script, half the people were still illiterate.

On the way back to town, I asked Riaz, “Are there any ships that go from here to Cyprus?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“So can I get a ship to Cyprus from Latakia?”

“I think.”

“You think yes?”

“I think no.”

He was right—no ferries ran anymore, though there were plenty of container ships in the port. The town was small and tidy and sunny, and with vaguely European architecture, unlike cold, dusty and oriental Aleppo. It seemed to me amazing that in the space of a single morning I had passed from one climate to another; and not only the weather here, but aspects of the atmosphere, were identical to a hundred other places I had seen on the Mediterranean shore. Latakia was another example of a town that had much more in common with a port in Greece or Albania or Sardinia than any of its own inland towns, the sunny Mediterranean culture of the languor, the bougainvillea and palms and stucco house, the seaside promenade.

“You want to see Lateen?”