The Canaanites cited approvingly the work of Umberto Cassuto, who translated Ugaritic poetry into Hebrew. (Ugarit was an ancient city located in modern-day northern Syria, where in the early 20th century many important ancient texts, written in the Ugaritic language, were discovered.) Ugaritic verse bore an uncanny resemblance to the language of the Tanakh.[citation needed] The Canaanites argued that these texts proved that the people of the Land of Israel had been much closer socially and culturally to other peoples of the region than they had been to Judaism.