Emar (, ),
It has been the source of many Cuneiform script clay tablet, making it rank with Ugarit, Mari and Ebla among the most important archaeological sites of Syria. In these texts, dating from the 14th century BC to the fall of Emar in 1187 BC,[Jean-Claude Margueron and Veronica Boutte, "Emar, Capital of Aštata in the Fourteenth Century BCE" The Biblical Archaeologist 58.3 (September 1995:126-138); a single Old Babylonian tablet was recovered.] and in excavations in several campaigns since the 1970s, Emar emerges as an important Bronze Age trade center, occupying a liminal position between the power centers of Upper Mesopotamia and AnatoliaSyria. Unlike other cities, the tablets preserved at Emar, most of them in Akkadian and of the thirteenth century BC, are not royal or official, but record private transactions, judicial records, dealings in real estate, marriages, last wills, formal adoptions. In the house of a priest, a library contained literary and lexical texts in the Mesopotamian tradition, and ritual texts for local cults. The area of Emar was fortified by the Romans, Byzantines, and medieval Arabs as Barbalissos or Balis but that location is slightly removed from the more ancient tell and is dealt with in its separate article.
History
Emar was strategically sited as a trans-shipping point where trade on the Euphrates was reloaded for shipping by overland route.
Early Bronze
In the middle of the third millennium BC Emar came under the influence of the rulers of
Ebla; the city is mentioned in archives at Ebla.
Middle Bronze
In Mari texts of the eighteenth century BC, (Middle Bronze Age), Emar was under the influence of the neighboring
Amorite state of
Yamhad. There was no local tradition of kingship at Emar.
From 1760 BC onwards, the Kingdom of Mari ruled by Zimri-Lim had been destroyed by Hammurabi, and a new polity arose at Terqa as the Kingdom of Khana to the immediate east of Emar.
Late Bronze
In the Late Bronze, the region came under the control of the
Mitanni. Following the fall of Aleppo, the royal family took refuge with the maternal line at Emar where prince
Idrimi would emerge.
For the thirteenth and the early twelfth centuries BC (Late Bronze Age), there is written documentation from Emar itself, mostly in the Akkadian language, and also references in contemporaneous texts from Hattusa, Ugarit, and in Assyrian archives; at the time Emar was within the Hittites sphere of influence, subject to the king of Carchemish, a Hittite client-king.
It was the chief city of a Hittite border province known as
the Land of Astata (Ashtata) which included Tell Fray. Correlating the kings of Emar with the known king-list of Carchemish provides some absolute dating.
Archaeological and written documentation come to an end in the late twelfth century BC as a result of the Bronze Age collapse. The actual date of destruction has been placed at 1187 BC in the 2nd regnal year of king Meli-Shipak II of Babylon[Daniel Arnaud, Les textes d'Emar et la chronologie de la fin du Bronze Recent, Syria, vol. 52, pp. 88-89, 1975]
Later periods
The site remained desolate at the unstable eastern borders of the
Roman Empire, resettled nearby as
Barbalissos. In 253, it was the site of the Battle of Barbalissos between the Sassanid Persians under
Shapur I and Roman troops.
Archaeology
The initial salvage excavations in advance of the rising waters of the Syrian
Tabqa Dam project impounding Lake El Assad were undertaken by two French teams, in 1972-76, under the direction of Jean-Claude Margueron.
[Margueron published findings at Emar between 1975 and 1990, beginning with "Les fouilles françaises de Meskéné-Emar", in Comptes-rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belle-Lettres 1975:201-213; Daniel Arnaud published the cuneiform texts, 1985-87.]
Late Bronze Age temple
Excavations revealed a temple area comprising the sanctuaries of the
weather god Baal and possibly of his consort
Astarte of the Late Bronze Age (thirteenth and early twelfth century BC).
Cuneiform tablets
After the conclusion of the French excavations the site was left unguarded and was systematically looted, bringing many cuneiform
clay tablet onto the antiquities gray market stripped of their context. In 1992, the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums took charge of the site, and a fresh series of campaigns revealed earlier strata, of the Middle and Early Bronze Ages (second half of the third millennium and the first half of the second millennium BC) the
Imar that was mentioned in the archives of Mari and elsewhere. Beginning in 1996, the Syrian effort was joined by a team from the University of Tübingen Germany.
[U. Finkbeiner, Emar & Balis 1996-1998. Preliminary Report of the Joint Syrian-German Excavations with the Collaboration of Princeton University, Berytus, vol. 44, pp.5-34, 2000][U. Finkbeiner and F. Sakal, Emar after the closure of the Tabqa Dam - The Syrian-German Excavations 1996 - 2002. Volume I: Late Roman and Medieval Cemeteries and Environmental Studies, Brepols, 2010, ]
So far, around 1100 tablets in Akkadian have been recovered from the site,
800 from the excavation and around 300 emerging on the antiquities market. In
addition 100 tablets in Hurrian and 1 in Hittites have also
been found. All but one of the tablets are from the Late Bronze Age.
Notes
See also
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Cities of the ancient Near East
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Chronology of the ancient Near East
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Tell Hadidi
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Arnaud, Daniel, Emar: Récherches au pays d'Aştata VI: Textes sumériens et akkadiens, Erc/Adpf, 1987,
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D. Beyer, Meskene-Emar. Dix ans de travaux 1972-1982, Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1982,
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Chavalas, Mark William, Emar: the history, religion, and culture of a Syrian town in the late Bronze Age, CDL Press, 1996,
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D'Alfonso, Lorenzo, Yoram Cohen Dietrich Sürenhagen, The City of Emar Among the Late Bronze Age Empires, Eisenbrauns, 2008,
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Stephanie Dalley and Beatrice Teissier, Tablets from the Vicinity of Emar and Elsewhere, Iraq, vol. 54, pp. 83–111, 1992
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Yoram Cohen, The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age, Eisenbrauns, 2009,
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Fleming, Daniel E., Time at Emar: The Cultic Calendar and the Rituals from the Diviner's Archive, Mesopotamian Civilizations 11, Jerrold S. Cooper ed. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2000.
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Fleming, Daniel E., The Installation of Baal's High Priestess at Emar: A Window on Ancient Syrian Religion, Harvard Semitic Studies 42. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.
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Eugen J. Pentiuc, West Semitic Vocabulary in the Akkadian Texts from Emar (Harvard Semitic Studies), Eisenbrauns, 2001,
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Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Cuniform Inscriptions in the Collection of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem: The Emar Tabltes, Styx, 2000,
External links
