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.