Abstract:

The Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit has long been identified as a location of ancient cosmopolitanism, where different people from around the eastern Mediterranean and Near East met and interacted. Given the longstanding excavations of the site, the voluminous textual record that has been recovered, and the long history of scholarship, the site offers a unique opportunity to explore the dynamics of “foreignness” in a Late Bronze Age context where the presence of foreigners was, if not normative, expected. Using insights from critical theory derived from the discipline of Geography, this paper explores how, in Engin Isin’s terms, the city is not where difference is found but rather where difference is made (labeled and reified), especially through what Julie Young has called “spatial practices and technologies of governance”. Through the examination of locations of every day encounters, this paper shall explore how foreigners are recognized as such, how their relations with non-foreigners are managed (explicitly and implicitly), how different scales of self and otherness are created and maintained, how these constructed identities are naturalized, and what modalities emerge or are imposed to mediate these relationships. Rather than seeking to identify a monolithic approach to foreignness, by examining different examples of micropublic interactions (such as in moments of palatial administration), this paper seeks to untangle some of the multi-scalar and multi-semiotic aspects of foreignness at Ugarit.