The articles published in this volume are the written versions of the
papers presented during a symposium held under the same title in Leiden
on the 13th and 14th of December 2007. This was the fourth in a series
of symposiums jointly organized by the Department of Languages and
Cultures of Mesopotamia and Anatolia (TCMA) and the Netherlands
Institute for the Near East (NINO) at Leiden University. The focus of
the symposium was on the aspects of society and administration that we
can deduce from the syllabic and alphabetic cuneiform texts found at Ras
Shamra since 1929. Although the organization of the society and its
administration at Ugarit has received much attention many questions
concerning the administrative texts still remain unsolved and new
theories have changed our view of that society. The aim of the symposium
was to look into a number of these unsolved questions and to discuss
theoretical approaches that have recently been proposed.
