Exploring the Garden of Uzza 15 palace, they were easily accessible from the garden. Indeed, the architectural layout of the surrounding buildings, courts and internal avenues suggests that the garden was an area of crucial importance within the palace (60). This is quite possibly the cult place of the mortuary ritual detailed in KTU 1.106 (61). Archaeological evidence from Ugarit thus appears to represent a notable point of reference in exploring the biblical Garden of Uzza. The biblical and non-biblical material surveyed thus far suggests that a plausible case based upon cumulative evidence can be constructed to support the proposal that, in certain contexts, biblical ˆg/hng is better rendered “mortuary garden”, and that the accepted semantic range for this term might be expanded accordingly. The Ugaritic material is also suggestive of a garden- focused cult practice related to the veneration or commemoration of dead ancestors, shedding some light on the religious significance of the biblical assertion that kings Manasseh and Amon were buried in a garden (2 Kgs 21,18.26). However, little of any certainty can be claimed for the biblical material given that the nature of the evidence, as observed above, is cumulative, rather than conclusive. Indeed, Starodoub-Scharr has also noticed the possible parallels between the royal garden at Ugarit and the biblical Garden of Uzza, but minimizes any connection with a royal cult of dead ancestors on the presumed basis of a lack of evidence from the biblical world (62). Yet it may be that rather more can be made of this connection. 3. An iconographic mortuary garden at Kal˙u In 878 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian king Aππurnas≥irpal II relocated the capital of his empire from the city of Aππur to Kal˙u. The seat of royal power was now the newly-constructed Northwest Palace, famed for its magnificent interiors. Among these are hundreds of marble wall-slabs engraved in relief, depicting various scenes of kingship. The most (60) K. STARODOUB-SCHARR, “The Royal Garden in the Great Royal Palace of Ugarit: To the Interpretation of the Sacral Aspect of the Royalty in the Ancient Palestine and Syria”, Proceedings of the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies. Division A: The Bible and Its World (ed. R. MARGOLIN) (Jerusalem 1999) 253*-268*. (61) PARDEE, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, 104, n. 57; DEL OLMO LETE, “GN, el cementerio regio”, 63. This is reluctantly accepted as a probability by STARODOUB-SCHARR, for whom the association of the palace garden with the ritual detailed in KTU 1.106 is less certain. (62) “The Royal Garden”, 262*.