Summary
Pughat is the sister of Aqhat and the daughter of Danel in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat. She sees the signs of the killing before anyone knows of it, lifts her grieving father onto the donkey, and after seven years of mourning goes out to seek her brother's killer, disguised in a woman's clothes with a warrior's weapons beneath them.
Whenever the poem names her it gives her three epithets: she "who carries water on her shoulder, who wrings the dew from the fleece, who knows the courses of the stars". When Yatpan has killed Aqhat at Anat's command, Pughat lifts her eyes and sees that the fleece on the threshing floor is dry and the fruit of the orchard shrivelled, and that falcons are hovering over her father's house; she weeps in her heart and tears her father's garment. Danel curses the clouds, then tells her to harness the donkey; weeping she harnesses it, weeping she lifts her father and sets him on its back, and he goes round his fields cracked by the heat. Then word comes that Aqhat is dead; Danel searches the vultures until he finds his son's remains and buries them, and mourns him for seven years. When the mourning is over he offers sacrifice and incense, and Pughat says: "Father, bless me, that I may go forth blessed, that I may smite my brother's smiter, kill my sibling's killer." He blesses her.
She goes down to the sea, washes and rouges herself with shellfish dye from the sea; underneath she puts on a warrior's equipment, a dagger in her sheath and a sword in her scabbard, and on top she puts on women's clothes. At the going down of Shapash, the luminary of the gods, she reaches tents in the steppe, and Yatpan is told: "Our employer has come", for they take her to be Anat. Yatpan says: "Take this and give me to drink; take the cup from my hand", and she takes it and gives him drink. Having drunk, he boasts: "The hand which smote Aqhat the hero will smite thousands of the Lady's enemies." Her heart is like a serpent; she fills him with wine and gives him mixed wine a second time, and there the tablet breaks, so we do not know whether she completed her revenge.
The idea her story turns on is that the small knowledge that keeps a household is what uncovers its ruin and answers it. The daughter who gathers dew, carries water and knows the stars is the first to see that the dew has failed and the birds are circling, and reads death from its signs on the earth and in the sky. Then she does the work of the son her father has lost: in this poem it is the son who supports his father and drives off whoever harms him, and when the son is killed the daughter takes up that work. The project's Canaanite essay reads the Aqhat story as a conflict of generations over a hunter's tool and does not mention Pughat, but within that reading she is the daughter who bears the cost of the conflict for the household. Pughat puts on Anat's likeness and kills the killer by the same cunning that killed her brother: as Anat hid her man among the vultures, Pughat hides the sword under women's clothes.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The tablets write pġt; the final t is the feminine ending, leaving pġ. In Ugaritic it is also a common noun meaning "girl": in the legend of Kirta the king is promised that his wife "will give birth to the girl", with this very word. Ugaritic p is Arabic f and ġ is Arabic gh, so the two letters are f-gh, and Lane gives fāghiya and faghw as the flower of henna, or the blossom of any sweet-smelling plant, and a sweet odour. Hebrew has the midwife Puah in Exodus with ʿ in place of ġ, since Hebrew merged the two letters into ʿayin; and Arabic itself has fāʿiya, with ʿ, as a dialect form of fāghiya, the flower of henna. On this reading, proposed on the method, Pughat is "the blossom", the girl in her first ripeness as the henna flower is named, the blossom who rouges and adorns herself with a sword beneath her clothes. The limits of the reading are set out under the linguistic root.
Linguistic Root
| Form | Language | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pġt | Ugaritic | Pughat; girl |
| Pûʿâ | Hebrew | a midwife in Exodus |
| fāghiya, faghw | Arabic | the flower of henna; the blossom of a sweet plant; a sweet odour |
| fāʿiya | Arabic | dialect form of fāghiya |
ġ and ʿ
In his notes on the Legend of Keret Wyatt says the word pġt is the name of Aqhat's sister in her story and of one of the two Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1:15, Puah, and suggests that the Hebrew name is from the verb pāʿâ, to cry out as a woman in childbirth, as in Isaiah 42:14. Brown, Driver and Briggs give Pûʿâ as the name of a midwife, Greek Φουα. Ugaritic ġ stays gh in Arabic and becomes ʿ in Hebrew, as the Juthoor table says: ʿ and gh both map to Hebrew ʿayin. So Arabic f-gh and Hebrew p-ʿ correspond regularly, and Arabic itself agrees by saying both fāghiya and fāʿiya for the flower of henna.
The blossom and the girl
Lane gives fāghiya as the flower of henna, or the flower of anything; a tradition calls it the chief of the sweet-smelling plants of Paradise, and afghā is said of a plant that puts forth its flower. From the same root faghā is said of a thing that became revealed or divulged, and of an odour that became perceptible. The limit of the reading is that the sense "girl" is fixed in Ugaritic by the text, and the sense "blossom" in Arabic by the lexicon, while the bridge between them is the likeness of a girl to a flower; no Semitic text is known that calls a girl by this word. Wyatt's Hebrew suggestion, the cry of childbirth, suits the midwife rather than the girl.
Key Mythic Narratives
Dew and stars
On the epithet "who wrings the dew from the fleece" Wyatt follows de Moor and Margalit and compares Gideon's fleece in Judges, where Gideon finds the fleece wet and the ground around it dry, wrings it out and fills a bowl with water; collecting dew from a fleece, he says, was a way of gathering drinking water. On "who knows the courses of the stars" he says that nothing from Ugarit explains it, that it may involve both astronomy and the farming calendar, but he refuses to make her a mere farm girl: she is a king's daughter and will play the part of a warrior. In the dry fleece on the threshing floor Pughat knew that something had happened: the dew she gathers every morning is what Baal's daughter Tallay carries in the Baal Cycle.
Who they take her for
Some scholars restore "our employer" in the words of Yatpan's men as Anat herself, so that they take Pughat for Anat; others restore "the girl", so that they take her for a servant who fills their cups. Wyatt calls the choice finely balanced and inclines to the second, so that the poet mocks them. Some take the Rephaim tablets as the continuation of the story.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
In the North Skaði puts on helmet and mail-coat, takes all her weapons and goes to Asgard to avenge her father Þjazi, as Pughat arms herself to avenge her brother. But the gods make peace with Skaði and give her a husband, while Pughat goes alone to the killer's tent.
Pughat is a human likeness of Anat: Anat searches for her brother Baal until she finds his body, then seizes Mot and splits him with a sword, while Pughat seeks her brother's killer dressed in Anat's likeness.