“... We have no direct evidence for why second-order centres in the Kingdom were subject to new permanent settlements while the capital was not. It may be a long- term effect of actions taken during Ugarit’s destruction – sources on the siege and conquest of cities in the ancient Near East often refer to the deliberate destruction of agricultural resources, such as the burning of fruit trees or the wrecking of fields.17 This destruction of food resources is implied by KTU 2.61, which seems to be a letter from another settlement in the kingdom to the capital and reports: When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!18 If such wrecking of agriculture occurred at Ras Shamra, it may well have made Ugarit a less attractive site for reoccupation, especially by refugees who were perhaps few in number and somewhat in disarray. ...” “... 17 For example, 2 Kings 3, 19: ‘You shall conquer every fortified town and every splendid city, you shall fell every good tree and stop up every spring, and every fertile field you shall ruin with stones’. Cf. Deuteronomy 20, 19–20, which bans the destruction of fruit trees during a siege, or Tiglath-Pileser III’s boast that he cut down all the gardens and orchards of Damascus when he besieged it in 733 BC (Tadmor 1994, 78, cited by Eph’al 2009, 52, see also 14–15). Similar actions are recorded by the Egyptians and Hittites (Hasel 2016, 214–215). However, Cole (1997) cautions against taking the documentary accounts over-literally. In his view, the economic and subsistence importance of orchards makes it unlikely they would have been destroyed peremptorily. Instead, he suggests the accounts mix a hyperbolic literary trope with elements of psychological warfare whereby trees would have been destroyed gradually to weaken defenders’ resolve and encourage surrender. ...”