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Late Bronze Age tablets mentioning a place called Alashiya have been found at numerous Near Eastern sites, including Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, on the Mediterranean coast of Syria). The renowned excavator of Ugarit, French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer (1898–1982), came to believe that the “Alashiya” of the ancient texts referred to both the island of Cyprus and the site of modern Enkomi (its ancient name is unknown), one of the few significant settlements on Cyprus in the latter part of the second millennium B.C. Most modern scholars have come to the same conclusion as Schaeffer, though others, like author Robert Merrillees, suggest that Cyprus is the least likely of a number of possible locations for Alashiya.