Legend of Keret

The Legend of Keret, also known as the Epic of King Keret, is an ancient Ugaritic epic poem, dated to Late Bronze Age, circa 1500 – 1200 BC. It recounts the myth of King Keret of Hubur.

The epic of Keret is contained in three rectangular clay tablets, excavated by a team of French archaeologists in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria in 1930–31. The text is written in the Ugaritic cuneiform script. (While this script looks superficially similar to Mesopotamian cuneiform, there's no direct relationship between them.) Not all of the tablets recovered were well-preserved and some of the tablets, containing the ending of the story, appeared to be missing. The tablets were inscribed by Ilimilku, a high priest who was also the scribe for the Myth of Baal (a part of the Baal cycle) and the Legend of Aqhat, two other famous Ugaritic epic poems discovered at the Ras Shamra site.

The initial French translation of the tablets was published by a French archaeologist Charles Virolleaud, in a 1936 monograph and then in the journal Syria. A substantial number of other translations, in many languages, appeared afterwards. Among them the translations of Ginsberg (1946) and Herdner (1963) are widely used. Some of the more modern translations include Gordon (1977), Gibson (1978),Coogan (1978), and Greenstein (1997).

The Keret tablets are held at the Musée National d'Alep, Syria.

King Keret of Hubur (or Khuburu), despite being reputed to be a son of the great god El himself, was struck with many misfortunes. Although Keret had seven wives, they all either died in childbirth or of various diseases or deserted him, and Keret had no surviving children. While his mother had eight sons, Keret was the only one to survive and he had no family members to succeed him and saw his dynasty in ruin.

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