Echos from Ugarit

"This song is for you"

In 1929 a peasant plowing his field 10 km north of Lattakia (Syria) unearthed a strange looking stone in an area called Ras Shamra. He immediately informed the authorities but little did he or the rest of the world know then about the magnitude of his discovery. French archeologist Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer(1898–1982) spent the rest of his life excavating the site. Ugarit was found.

Ugarit was an independent Canaanite kingdom that reigned over the eastern Mediterranean in the 18th century BC (3800 years ago). The Phoenicians, descendants of the Canaanites, built great palaces, temples and shrines in Ugarit between 1450 – 1200 BC. But most importantly they built libraries. They ruled the sea with their strong ships made from the cedars of Lebanon and became the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. They traded silver, gold, textiles and ivory with coastal cities, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Ugarit had a population of 10,000 before she was destroyed and burnt down in 1200 BC by the Sea Peoples whose origins remain a mystery for today's scholars.

It is in Ugarit, among the thousands of tablets found within the walls of her great palaces and libraries that the first Alphabet in history was discovered by Schaeffer. Evidently the Canaanites and their descendants the Phoenicians realized that human speech consists of a finite number of sounds. They simply enough created a symbol for each of these sounds. Well not really that simple as it took civilization 2000 years to achieve this feat. All subsequent phonetic languages (i.e. Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, etc.) utilized most of the original 30 symbols or letters. I find it interesting that the root of the word phonetic as per modern English dictionaries is considered Greek (from phōnētikós from phōneîn to speak). Is it really? Why stop there? Where did phōneîn come from? What was the name of those people living on the Eastern Mediterranean (in today's Syria and Lebanon)? Phoenicians :-) How convenient?

There was one more discovery of unimaginable consequence found in Ugarit. An unearthed clay tablet, one among the multitude, took a while to decipher. Not because it did not stare at archeologists straight in the face but because of inherent biases even in scientific pursuit. Finally in 1974, Anne D. Kilmer, professor of Assyriology at the University of California at Berkeley and after five years of hard work was able to interpret the cuneiform script as the lyrics and musical symbols of an Ugaritan song dating back to 3400 BC. The discovery revolutionized music history completely for it moved backward in time the first notated piece of music by 3,000 years. The origin of Western music is not the 400 BC papyrus which contained the Greek Euripides' play Orestes but a much older religious hymn from Ugarit.

Malek Jandali is a Syrian pianist who lives in the United States. He was born in 1972 in Germany and was raised in Homs, Syria after his parents returned to their hometown. He received his early schooling there and graduated from the Arab Conservatory of music in Damascus. Mr. Jandali is an accomplished and daring musician who has won several international awards. His greatest achievement, however, is the release of his 2008 album, Echos from Ugarit in which he rendered the first notated song in history with his eloquent piano. It took such an exceptionally inspired Syrian to remind the world of a simple fact of life: It all started in our backyard, a mere one-hour drive from where I am sitting right now listening to the oldest song in the world being played by a Homsi with an unlimited talent.

Below are Youtube, and download links to Malek Jandali's Echos from Ugarit.




Download Echoes From Ugarit

References:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,911121,00.html
http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=article&cat=Artamp;Culture&article=1025
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-3857985.html
http://www.syriagate.com/Syria/about/cities/Latakia/ugarithistory.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malek_Jandali
http://www.malekjandali.com/

Five O

 

1960's
The Scar

In the aftermath of the six-day-war a long trench was dug in the middle of an open field near my home by the sea. More like a scar, it measured a hundred meters long by two meters wide. We kids went there and played War in the afternoon.
"Tatatatatata," we roared back and forth, reproducing the cracking reports of machine guns. When we all died, I climbed out with muddied pants and sand in my hair and rode my bicycle frantically across the gritty breadth of the field. I sped over the pebbles raising a storm of dust in my wake all the while keeping a watchful eye on the gaping wound in the ground. I pulled to the edge of the asphalt and braked hard in a sweeping arc. I stood up, removed the sticky underwear wedged up my ass and gathered my courage to jump to sea side. I pedaled as furiously as I could. The wheels spun in the air over the ditch then made contact, an inch or two short. I plunged forward hitting a sharp protruding stone chin first. The gush of warm blood sprinkled the earth through my fingers. I staggered then fell. Human voices faded in the background; the light of day dimmed then was swallowed by darkness. Minutes later I regained consciousness and winced in pain.
“How is he doctor? Please tell me how he is?”
“Don't worry Abu Tarek¹. He's a tough kid.” My father reassured the man who carried my limp body to him and continued stitching my chin.
I still have the scar.


1970's
New World
I stared at the masts of ships disappearing below the horizon. Seagulls shrieked above, soared with invisible drafts then vanished. A crowd of ancestral spirits prattled in my head, nudging me and pulling at my sleeve. You should leave, they called, it's time. Streaks of lightening cast short-lived shadows on the high walls of dead-end alleys. I bid farewell to the life I knew, hunched over against the cold drizzle and walked away.
It was raining in Louisiana too on my 18th birthday but this time I took my clothes off and let the deluge wash my dehydrated skin. Nobody is right, I found out, but we might be all wrong. I absorbed this realization like a Porifera² left to die in the sun. I pitied the wasted youth of my generation and those yet to come for not facing their days and nights with decisions and indecisions.
We spun the bottle: Truth or Dare?
"Truth!"
"What do you want to do with your life?"
"I want to fuck the universe till it screams." I was drunk, when I said that, or stoned. I think I was both.

I never got around actually doing that but I did kiss it... and it moaned.

1980's
Daughter of Astarte³
She was having a hard time breathing as I held her tiny body in my arms. There she was a part of me outside of me for the first time. I stayed all night by the NICU.

"Get some sleep." The doctor who stitched my chin twenty years earlier said and patted my shoulder.

He reassured me that she'll be alright in the morning, not because he was certain but because he wanted to as much as I did.

"Her name is Ebla" I said, "after the great Syrian city that proved that the whole world is living a big lie."
"Give me the pleasure of naming her myself." My father said. "She's Diana, goddess of the hunt and of the moon, daughter of our own Astarte."
I sat for hours on end near Diana's cot waiting for her to wake up. Then one day she rode my motorcycle on the winding mountain roads and on my back in the same house where I was born. She changed me forever. She made me a father.

1990's
Losing
"How long?"
"A month. Two at most." Dad replied.
I spent the next four weeks with her. She told me a story everyday, except that they kept getting shorter. So did her days as she slept more and more until she never woke up.
I missed my mother, my storyteller, my friend, my fan and idol. She was my rock in times of need, my lighthouse in the storm, my laughter and tears. I lost her.

2000's
Falling in Love

I was a late bloomer. I had lived my entire life in the shadow of a paradox, etherized with the void of being and the timidity of acceptance. I fell in love… with life, with the morning sun and the silent passage of the moon across the sky. I embraced time and distance at last. I fathomed the “seemingly” predetermined motion of the heavenly bodies in the sky, the toil of ants underground and our human voyage. As I passively rode the rapids down the river I had a change of heart. I found a low hanging branch and held on to it. There is a beautiful ait upstream, a little further back. I do not want to be anywhere else.
That eventually the torrent would sweep us all became irrelevant. I swam against the current to reach my island or die trying.

Five moments in time, mind-picked from the fleeting decades of my life. I am 50*



¹ Abu Tarek, my neighbor, made the best Knafeh in the world. He passed away ten years ago.
² Porifera: an animal phylum comprising the sponges.
³ Astarte: Syrian Goddess, grandmother of all the subsequent Greek and Roman Goddesses of fertility, sexuality and war

* 50: Coming up this week.

Atargatis

Perhaps I should start this article by explaining the term Levant(1) since it might not be familiar to all the readers of this blog. The word comes from Middle French and means the Orient. From a geographical perspective, the Levant is that region of West Asia comprising the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It is bordered to the north by the Taurus mountains of Turkey. It reaches the Zagros mountain range which forms the border between Iraq and Iran to the east and extends southward to the Arabian desert. The Island of Cyprus was historically, and until very recent times culturally, a part of Greater Syria, as the Levant is known to the more fervent Syrian Social Nationalists in Lebanon and Syria. Additionally, Jordan, Palestine, the Sinai Desert and parts of Iraq belong to this region as well. If you are wondering whether I accidentally omitted Israel or not, wonder no more. A sixty-two year old “country” with an acute identity crisis as to claim that it invented Hummus and Falafel, both documented to have been served in popular eating houses in Tartous in the latter part of the 19th century, does not belong here. The apartheid walls they built will mostly keep them, the Israelis, prisoners of their own guilt, further isolating them from a magical place of immense ethnic diversity.

Well now that I have passed my political message across I can focus on the more meaningful aspects of life. Among my most persistent interests in the field of Levantine history is the pursuit of Syrian deities. I find it myopic that the West traces its roots to Greek culture and mythology then stops. The Greeks were outstanding in their own right and they indeed were the catalyst behind the rise of Western civilization. But history predated them and started a little further east, not too far from where I am sitting right now behind my American branded laptop. German Archeologist, Markus Gschwind remarked that “beneath every footstep in Syria is an ancient civilization(2).” Rightly so, as merely a stone throw away from my window Phoenician ships once sailed across the Mediterranean carrying dyes and silk in their holds and the Alphabet and Gods in the language of their sailors. My story today is about one Syrian Goddess by the name of Atargatis(3).

Today Atargatis might not be a household Syrian name as other “local” deities but that does not make her any less significant. In fact, she is perhaps the most important pre-monotheist divinity of the Levant. Early evidence of her cult dates back to 1,000 BC but what fascinates me most about her is that she was in fact the first mermaid(4). Atargatis, whose followers eventually spread to Greece and Rome was the half-human / half-fish Goddess of Earth, Fertility and Water. Early on both the dove and the fish were used as symbols of her. The dove as an emblem of love and the fish representing bounty and fertility. She was also, to the faithful, responsible for motivation and inventiveness and her reign extended beyond the realm of land and sea to encompass the heavens. Zeus (The Greeks called Her Derketo, Goddess of Syria) splashed an image of a fish in the sky for her sake by creating the Pisces constellation.

Phoenician sailors brought her to Sicily. From there her  followers spread northward reaching Rome, where she was known as Dea Syria, the Syrian Goddess. She was admitted into the Roman pantheon side by side with Jupiter (Syrian Haddad :-) and worshiped as reverently. Her faith continued to grow and spread throughout the Roman Empire and the Gaul (Western Europe) and toward the end of this era she reached the status of the Great Mother Goddess of the Empire.
 
Atargatis is a Semitic word. She was called Athtart by the Phoenicians and perhaps that explains why she is often confused with Astarte. Strong evidence suggests that they were two different deities as their cults were very distinct from one another initially. Several other goddesses, Syrian, Greek and Roman were later identified with Atargatis, perhaps all better known than her: Ishtar, Venus Urania, Hera, Rhea, Cybele, Aphrodite and Artemis Azzanathcona. Even most Syrians today are more familiar with Atargatis' daughter Semiramis, the famous Assyrian queen who built the hanging gardens.

Early Syrian religions did not provide impetus for the rise of monotheist Judaism, Christianity and Islam only but formed the mythological bedrock of paganism in Europe. The statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen(5) sculpted by Edvard Erichsen in 1913 is said to symbolize a fairy tale. Danish author and poet Hans Christian Andersen wrote about a mermaid who fell in love with a prince living on land and who came to shore everyday to see him. Is it a Viking figment of imagination or simply a Syrian story of old neglected by the sons and daughters of Atargatis?

(1)Levant: also known as Al-Mashriq and Bilad Al-Sham

(2)Thaindian News
(3)The Obscure Goddess Online Dictionary
(4)Wikepedia
(5)The Little Mermaid

Let it Snow

I stood behind the kitchen window on this Friday morning. It was 7:00AM when the cloud above broke her water. Flurries of snow started falling and drifting in the light wind, very unusual for seaside Mediterranean Tartous. I went outside to the balcony to drink my espresso and enjoyed five magical minutes. The thermometer showed 8ºC. What a glorious day!

I woke Fares up, “Come on! There must be plenty of snow for us in Kadmous.”

“Oh, Baba! Are you sure?” Fares had only been in the snow once a few years ago in Farayyah, Lebanon. He was about five and he had a blast so his excitement was only natural.

At 10:00AM we left Tartous and headed north on the Lattakia Highway. 35 KM down the road we crossed Banias and made a right turn and quickly climbed our way up the mountains. I could tell that whatever snow we might find would be light at best. We crossed one enchanted village after the other, Bermaya, Faresh Ka'bieh, Isquableh as we steadily gained altitude. 57 KM from home we reached Kadmous at an elevation of 1000 m (0ºC). Fares could not believe his eyes, there was snow indeed and everywhere. We drove for five minutes due north and stopped by a snow covered hill and well... played in the snow.

I hope you enjoy this short video of the day.

Trapped in Hope

"We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it”

Tennessee Williams

“There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators.”
Stephen Wright

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
James Arthur Baldwin

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“No man knows when his hour will come; As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them”
The Bible

“Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.”
Cullen Hightower

“Sometimes I feel that I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body - which actually works out pretty well”
Author Unknown

“With relish and delight, you continually bite at the bait; you are trapped, you fool - how will you ever escape?”
 Sri Guru Granth Sahib

“Love comes to those who still hope even though they've been disappointed, to those who still believe even though they've been betrayed, to those who still love even though they've been hurt before.”
Author Unknown

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
Albert Einstein

“In all things it is better to hope than to despair”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”
French Proverb

“Hope never abandons you; you abandon it”
George Weinberg

“Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope”
Author Unknown

“Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.”
Author Unknown

“Dum spiro, spero (Latin), "While I breathe, I hope"
Latin Proverb

P.S. You might of course deduct that presently I have nothing to say, that I am totally unispired. Well you are absolutely right

"I am trapped in hope."
abufares

Dutch Mills

Was it meant to be that way, to invariably fall in the arms of a new city only deep in the night? In the small hours of Monday I stepped out of the train station in the center of Rotterdam. She shuddered at my sudden appearance and defensively grabbed my throat with a bitterly cold hand. I pulled my collar high around the neck, squinted into the wind then walked north in search of a taxi. She relaxed and apologetically let go. "You're late", she said under her breath, vapor rolling with her words and disappearing instantly. Remnants of Christmas ornaments and lights shined and blinked for no one but me as the snow covered sidewalks were left completely deserted. Whoever celebrated here were gone, hiding within the comfort of quaint small apartments. If they were sleepless tonight and looked from behind their wide un-curtained windows to the streets below, they would see the shivering shadows of naked trees and the hunched figure of a lonely traveler seeking a warm bed.

I stared at her as the cab gobbled the chilly asphalt. So young, she looked, racy, tempting and in vogue. Rotterdam was completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe on May 14th, 1940 and rebuilt from scratch thereafter. Her modern skyline caught my eye and tickled my fancy. I have never met any city so adolescent and tempting like her before.

The steamy jet of water washed the dust from the lengthy traverse off of my body but did not bring solace to my mind. I was weary and tired and only a telepathic whisper, a sigh of relief, emanating from within brought sleep to my eyes. I dreamed of nothing in the short time I rested before my day began, before the next seventy two hours heartlessly kept me awake and on the run.

I was able to take short walks in between meetings. After the mutant tepid winter of the Levant the subzero temperatures felt imperative to my biological calendar. Memories from the distant past danced in my head. It had been a long time since I lived in such a cold place, yet the images were hopeful and alive. I longed for a frost that turns warm in the holding of hands. I saw our footprints in the snow, large and small entwining, crisscrossing as we hugged and swayed in a slow amble along a white path.

When it was finally over, the work, we dined in a superb seafood restaurant on the River Ijssel. Vitor, an epicure with a kind heart and a priceless sense of humor from Galicia and I sat across the table. Amid laughter and good food he talked lovingly of his homeland. I have learned more about what Spain is and is not that evening than I had from reading the many history books once upon a time. We drank a silky Caiño Blanca harvested from near the Minho river in Galicia, he told me. We talked of fish and wine, of La Coruña and Rotterdam, of the folly of men and the eternal beauty of women. Well past midnight we rode through the  countryside toward Schiphol airport near Amsterdam. As the sparse old Dutch mills stood silent in the dark modern ones turned incessantly in the wind. The forty five minute drive passed in the blink of an eye as the good times always do. We hugged for an everlasting minute in the lobby of yet another hotel. "Be safe my friend Vitor", I said. "See you in March, God only knows where, dear Abufares", he replied.

I did not have sufficient time to lose myself to slumber. Instead I tossed and turned waiting for icy take-offs and landings and a tiring drive home in the rain.

"Sleep well and hold me tight", I dreamed of the words kissing my forehead then capering down my face.

"Goodnight", I closed my eyes and floated in an azure womb of adoration unbeknown to the mass of desperate men. I did not stir a muscle for the next fourteen hours.

Good morning World, I am back in Tartous.

Packing

I do not sleep well on the night before I travel and the last hours before an imminent departure are always restless. Packing for a midwinter trip is knotty as there are more things to take and to forget.
This time I'm leaving the warmth of an unusually mild winter with absurdly beautiful weather (today: clear skies and 24ºC) to higher latitudes and subzero temperatures.
Out of Tartous in the morning and two taxis, two planes and a train later, it'll be past midnight in some small room of a big hotel in a strange city.
I will be back at the end of the week, hopefully with a  new story to tell.