ABSTRACT
From the earliest stages of its discovery and decipherment Ugaritic literature has been scrutinised for the presence of figurative language. Much of the search, indeed, was dictated by the very problem of decipherment and, as might be expected, is characterised by dominant reliance upon the heuristic powers of analogy. No portion of the Semitic lexicon has been neglected, or itself failed to benefit from nourishment provided by Ugaritic roots. The tangible product is a massive inventory of mooted rhetorical device: from parallelism and chiasmus to alliteration, anaphora and anadiplosis. Genre conventions and formulaic patterns have been discovered in abundance and though to attest to a widely diffused currenty of literary usage in the Ancient Near East. Occasionally a voice of protest can be heard, say, in favour of polygenesis as opposed to diffusion, or against the circular argument that interprets X in terms of Y and Y in terms of X. It must be admitted, however, that the harvest gleaned from Ugaritic is a rich one, especially perhaps in the field of poetic diction and structure.1
