Kirta

Summary

Kirta is a king in a long Ugaritic poem written by the scribe Ilimilku on three tablets, KTU 1.14, 1.15 and 1.16. The tablets write his name krt without vowels; the first editors read it Keret, others Kirta or Kirtu. The text makes him king of the house of Khabur and calls him "son of El" and "servant of El", yet he is a man who falls ill and nearly dies.

The poem opens with the ruin of his house. He had a lawful wife whose bride-price he had paid, and she went away; she had borne him seven sons, and the third died at birth, the fourth of disease, pestilence gathered in the fifth, the sea swallowed the sixth, and the seventh fell by the weapon, so that his whole line perished. Some scholars see gods behind the pestilence, the sea and the weapon: Resheph, Yamm and Shalhu, a river of the underworld; Wyatt allows a more neutral sense, and says that on any reading Kirta is evidently cursed. Other translators read seven wives instead of seven sons. Kirta went into his chamber weeping, his tears poured to the ground like shekels, until sleep overcame him, and El came down to him in his dream and asked: What ails Kirta that he weeps? Does he want the kingship of the Bull his father? He offered him silver, gold, slaves, chariots and horses, and Kirta said: What would I want with silver and gold? "It is sons I would beget, descendants I would multiply." Wyatt, KTU 1.14 I–II, pp. 180–186, notes 17, 18 and 20.

El told him to wash, to offer a lamb, bread and wine on the top of the tower to El and to Baal, then to muster an army beyond counting, in which the single man goes out and even the widow is enlisted, the sick man carries his bed and the bridegroom leaves his wife, and to march seven days to Udum abounding in rain and besiege it. Its king Pabil would offer him silver and gold to go away, and he should answer: "Give me what is not in my house: give me the maiden Hurriya, the most gracious of your family, your firstborn, whose beauty is as the beauty of Anat and whose loveliness is as the loveliness of Athtart." Kirta did as he was told. On the third day of his march he came to the sanctuary of Athirat of Tyre and the goddess of Sidon, and vowed: "If I take Hurriya into my house, I will give twice her weight in silver and three times her weight in gold." Then he besieged Udum without shooting an arrow, until the lowing of Pabil's oxen, the braying of his asses and the howling of his dogs kept the king from sleep; Pabil sent the wealth, Kirta sent it back and asked for the maiden, she was given to him, and the people of Udum lamented her as a cow lows for her calf.

Kirta then held a feast at which the gods came, and El took a cup and blessed his servant: the woman will bear you seven sons and make them eight, she will bear Yassib the heir, who will drink the milk of Athirat; then he said: "Be greatly exalted, Kirta, among the Rephaim of the earth, in the convocation of the assembly of Ditan", and promised him daughters. Within seven years Kirta's sons were as many as had been promised, and Hurriya's daughters as many as they. "And Athirat remembered his vow": has Kirta broken his vow? Then the tablet breaks, and after the break Kirta is ill. His son Ilhu wept for him: "How can you die, father? Is Kirta then called a son of El? Do the gods die?" The land dried up in his illness; the ploughmen lifted their heads looking for Baal's rain, and bread ran out in their granaries, wine in their skins and oil in their jars. El asked the gods seven times: "Who among you will remove the sickness, will drive out the disease?" and none answered. Then he said: sit, my sons, I will do the work myself. He filled his hand with clay and shaped from it a remover of sickness, Shataqat. She entered Kirta's house, drove Mot out of the city, struck with a staff so that the sickness came out of his temples, washed the sweat from Kirta, opened his appetite, and he ate and sat on his throne.

His eldest son Yassib was sitting in the palace, and his inner voice told him his father was dying; he went to him and said: "You have not tried the case of the widow, you have not judged the cause of the powerless, you have not banished those who plunder the child of the poor, you do not feed the orphan.. Step down from your kingship, and I shall be king." Kirta answered: "May Horon smash your head, my son, and Athtart-name-of-Baal your skull; may you fall in the prime of life." There the tablet ends, with the scribe's name below.

The idea Kirta's story turns on is that a royal house and the life of the land hang on one mortal man. His line is cut off and El gives him a full one; he forgets a vow and falls ill, the land dries up with him, and only El's own hand can heal him. Then the heir for whom all this was sought claims the throne before its time, and his father curses him. Wyatt says the whole story hangs on its last lines: the man who began by losing his sons ends by cursing his son.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the Canaanite essay does not read Kirta's name. krt is Arabic karīt, complete. In Lane sana karīt is a complete year, and so a day and a month; in the Lisān ḥawl karīt is a year complete in its number. Hebrew has the same letters in kārat, to cut off, as in the promise to David: "there shall not be cut off for you a man from the throne of Israel". Cutting off and completing meet within Arabic itself: jarama is to cut off, tajarrama al-ḥawl is said of a year that was completed, "as though it were cut off from the year before", and sana mujarrama is a complete year. Kirta's story is that of a house cut off and then made complete in number.

Linguistic Root

Kirta and karīt

Wyatt says he writes the name Keret only by convention, that Kirta and Kirtu are as conjectural, and that the safest course is to write its three consonants alone; he notes that a Hurrian king of Mitanni was called Kirta, so the name may be Hurrian. The three letters are unambiguous in Ugaritic: k is k, since Ugaritic writes q with another letter, and t is t, since it writes th with another letter.

In Arabic these letters give only karīt. Lane says sana karīt is a complete year, and so a day and a month. The Hawramani lexicon gives from the Lisān: "sana karīt and ḥawl karīt, that is, complete in number, and so the day and the month"; from the Muḥīṭ: "sana karīt: complete, mujarrama"; and from Ibn Fāris: "it has nothing but their saying ʿām karīt". In Lane mujarram is a complete year, from jarama, to cut off, and tajarrama al-ḥawl is said of a year that was completed, "as though it were cut off from the year before". So the Arabic dictionary explains completeness by cutting. Hebrew kārat is to cut off, and Akkadian karātu likewise; from it comes the biblical "there shall not be cut off for you a man from the throne of Israel", that is, your throne shall never lack a son to sit on it.

The reading passes through the story, so it needs a bridge: the dictionary gives completeness to the year, the day and the month, and the poem gives it to the number of a household, the house that "perished in its entirety" and within seven years is complete again with sons and daughters. The reading therefore stays open until a syllabic spelling of the hero's name, or a Semitic name of the same letters meaning "complete", turns up.

Set aside after checking the dictionary and the spelling: qarya and qrt, "town"; the Canaanite essay writes Hebrew qeret, "city", as "Keret" in its entry on Melqart, but that word has q and the hero's name has k; and karatha, to distress, since Arabic th answers a different Ugaritic letter.

Hurriya and Shataqat

The tablets write the bride's name ḥry, which Wyatt renders Hurriy. We read it on the method as Arabic ḥurra: in Lane a free-born woman, as opposed to a slave, and a woman of noble birth. The text calls her "the most gracious of your family" and the king's firstborn.

Wyatt explains the name of the woman El makes from clay, šʿtqt, as a verb of the root ʿ-t-q with the causative š, "she causes to be distant" or "she removes". In Lane ʿataqa al-ʿabd is said of a slave who passed out of slavery, and ʿataqa al-faras of a horse that outran the others and got away safe. On the method Shataqat is "she who sets free", who brings the sick man out of his sickness as a slave comes out of slavery.

Shifts used: the Ugaritic letters k, r, t answer Arabic letter for letter; the š of šʿtqt is a causative prefix.

Key Mythic Narratives

Kirta and Job

Wyatt notes that Parker recognized in the poem three common folk motifs and compared it with the book of Job. Job too had seven sons and three daughters, word came to him that a mighty wind struck the house and it collapsed on them and they died, and then God blessed his latter years more than the former, and he had seven sons and three daughters. Wyatt says that the catalogue of disasters that strikes Kirta is too much to be a coincidence, and that the story raises the same moral problem the book of Job explores.

Kirta and the Rephaim

Wyatt reads the mention of the Rephaim and the assembly of Ditan in El's blessing as pointing to Kirta's place among them after his death, with a hidden irony, since in the same story Kirta nearly dies. He notes that Kirta's name is not among the kings invoked in the royal funeral text KTU 1.161, although Ditan is.

Symbolic Reading

The essay that rereads the Canaanite myths reads Danel as "judge of El", the ideal man, wise and just, who feeds the widow and the orphan, and makes him "the first judge" in Canaanite society. Yassib judges his father by that very measure: he has not judged for the widow, nor for the powerless, nor fed the orphan. In both poems a king is measured by what he does for those who have no house.

The same essay reads Baal's absence as drought, and in Kirta's story drought comes when the king falls ill: the ploughmen look for Baal's rain, and the granaries, wineskins and jars run empty. Wyatt holds that the ruling house, Kirta's "house", is a main theme of the poem, and that the poem carries the royal ideology of Ugarit even while it criticizes it.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Mesopotamia another king without an heir, Etana of Kish, offered to Shamash every day and asked for the plant of birth so that he might have an heir, as Kirta offers to El and Baal on the top of the tower and asks for sons. Both stories make the continuity of kingship hang on a child.

At Ugarit itself Danel is a childless father who makes offerings to the gods and is blessed by El, a judge of the widow and the orphan, who then loses his son Aqhat. El's asking the gods seven times "Who will remove the sickness?" with no one answering belongs to the divine council, and it resembles the mare's calling the gods one after another in the spell of Horon. El's making Shataqat from clay is close to the making of humans from clay in the stories of the creation of humans.