Kothar-wa-Khasis

The Ugaritic kṯr w ḫss is a compound name: Kothar meaning “skilful” and Khasis meaning “wise” or “perceptive.” It is a hyphenated double-noun, as if the Greeks had named Hephaestus “Skill-and-Insight.” He is the divine craftsman of Canaanite religion, and almost every climactic moment in the Baal Cycle requires his work to happen. Without his clubs, Yam wins. Without his palace, Baal has no throne. Without his bow, the Aqhat tragedy never starts.

He is also the god of foreign techniques. His workshop is not in Ugarit. The tablets locate it on Kaphtor, the Northwest Semitic name for Crete, and in Hkpt, identified by most scholars with Memphis in Egypt. The most important god of metalwork in the Levantine pantheon was an immigrant.

Appearance

The Ugaritic poets give Kothar more dialogue than physical description. His voice is heard before his form is seen. When he appears in the Baal Cycle he travels swiftly, arrives unannounced, and works at speed. The recurring tag is that he is a master of bronze, a “skilful one of the metalwork.” Where iconography exists, the closest visual ancestor in the region is the Egyptian Ptah, the patron of craftsmen at Memphis: short, bearded, holding the tools of the smith. Many scholars read the Hkpt of the Ugaritic texts as a deliberate identification of Kothar with Ptah.

In Greek inheritance the figure becomes Hephaestus: lame, bearded, ironic, holding hammer and tongs. The lameness is a Greek invention, possibly reflecting smiths who were physically marked by the work, burns, deformities from long apprenticeship. The Ugaritic Kothar shows none of this. He is fast and strong, the master of every workshop he enters.

Function

Kothar’s function is technology in the strict sense. He makes the things that change what is possible. His three great works in the Ugaritic corpus are the clubs, the bow, and the palace.

The clubs are the weapons Baal uses to kill Yam. Kothar names them as he forges them: Yagrush (“Driver”) and Ayyamur (“Chaser”). He hands them to Baal with an incantation: “Drive Yam from his throne, Nahar from his seat of dominion.” Baal swings. The first strike fails. The second crushes Yam between the eyes. The named weapon is a Bronze Age innovation in storytelling. It survives into Beowulf’s Hrunting, into Arthur’s Excalibur, into Frodo’s Sting. Kothar is the smith who started the convention.

The palace is built on Mount Sapan after Baal claims kingship. Kothar argues with Baal for two tablets about whether to install windows. Baal refuses windows because he is afraid that his daughters or his enemies will escape, or because he is afraid that Yam will return through the openings. Kothar persists. Baal eventually agrees. The windows are installed. Through them Baal hurls his thunder. The dispute is the first preserved story in any tradition about an architect refusing a client’s brief and being right.

The bow appears in the Aqhat Epic. Kothar forges a divine composite bow as a gift for the king Daniel (not the biblical figure of the same name). Daniel’s son Aqhat receives it. The goddess Anat sees the bow and wants it. Aqhat refuses, insulting her in the process: “Bows are men’s gear. Do women hunt?” Anat hires the assassin Yatpan. Aqhat is killed. The bow is lost in the sea. The drought that follows is the consequence of Anat’s anger and Aqhat’s pride. Kothar’s craftsmanship is the trigger of the entire tragedy.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The Greek inheritance of Kothar is direct enough that some scholars treat the connection as one of the cleanest examples of Bronze Age cultural transmission. Hephaestus’s workshop is in the volcanic island of Lemnos, sometimes Crete, sometimes Sicily. Kothar’s workshop was on Crete (Kaphtor). The Greek smith forges divine weapons: Achilles’s shield, Aeneas’s armour, the chains for Prometheus, the throne that traps Hera. The function is the same. The named weapons are the same kind of named weapons. The trade route between Ugarit and the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age is documented in the archaeological record. Kothar most likely sailed west on a Ugaritic ship.

The Egyptian Ptah is the southern equivalent. Ptah is the craftsman god of Memphis, the patron of metalworkers, and the creator who speaks the world into being with his tongue and his heart. The identification in the Ugaritic texts of Kothar’s workshop with Hkpt (Memphis) suggests that the Levantine priests already saw the two as variants of the same deity. Each port city had its own version. The smith god travelled with the metal trade.

In the Hebrew Bible there is no craftsman god, because the Hebrew Bible has only one god and craftsmanship has been redistributed. The skill itself is described as a divine gift in Exodus 31, where Bezalel is “filled with the spirit of God in skill, intelligence, knowledge, and craftsmanship” to build the Tabernacle. The vocabulary of Kothar, skilful, wise, has been transferred to a human artisan, with God as the source of the gift.

Modern Survival

Kothar’s name does not survive in modern languages. His function does. Every named magical weapon in fantasy literature traces back through Hephaestus, and through Hephaestus to Kothar. Every dwarf forge in Norse and Tolkien tradition is a descendant of the Kaphtor workshop. The Ugaritic figure is the prototype of the smith god as a category.

In contemporary scholarship Kothar is one of the figures who most clearly demonstrates the Bronze Age Mediterranean’s interconnectedness. The Ugaritic tablets explicitly place his workshop on Crete and in Egypt. The Mycenaean Greeks adopted a Cretan smith god. The continuity from Kothar to Hephaestus runs through hard archaeological data, Levantine pottery in Crete, Cretan metalwork in Ugarit, Egyptian iconography on Levantine seals. The textual transmission rides on the trade routes.

The figure who built Baal’s palace and forged the weapons that killed the sea god is also, indirectly, the patron of every modern engineer who has named a piece of equipment after a god. The named weapon, the windowed throne room, the smith-as-architect: all of these conventions start in two clay tablets from a Syrian port city that burned around 1185 BCE.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Baal Cycle (KTU 1.1–1.6), clay tablets from Ugarit, scribed by Ilimilku (c. 1350–1315 BCE)
• Aqhat Epic (KTU 1.17), Ugaritic literary tablet
• Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford University Press, 2001)
• Nicolas Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit (Sheffield Academic Press, 2002)