Haradum, I: Une Ville nouvelle sur le Moyen-Euphrate.

• Author: Podany, Amanda H.

The city of Haradum was a remarkable place during the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries B.C. It was not large, just a handful of city blocks in extent. It was not powerful; as far as we know it made no great impression on the literature or history of the time. But in a world where cities almost invariably developed as mazes of narrow alleys and winding streets, Haradum was laid out on a rectangular grid. Whereas most cities conformed in shape to the tells on which they grew, Haradum was almost exactly square in plan. And, of great importance to historians and archaeologists, in a period for which documentation is in short supply - the last reigns of the First Dynasty of Babylon - Haradum was at its height.

The events of the reigns of Samsu-iluna, Abi-esuh, Ammi-ditana, Ammi-saduqa, and Samsu-ditana are poorly understood. Until recently, the northern border of their empire was thought to have collapsed after Hammurapi's reign, the kingdom ultimately extending only to the immediate environs of Babylon. The important texts from Haradum require that this reconstruction of events be revised; the kings of Babylon held sway over part of the former kingdom of Mari at least into the reign of Ammi-saduqa. Support for this also comes from the recent find of texts dating to the reigns of Ammi-saduqa and Samsu-ditana at the site of Terqa, north of Haradum.(1) It seems that we must do away with the old image of a weak, small Babylonian empire during the reigns of its latest kings.

Haradum (modern Khirbet ed-Diniye) was a city located on the Euphrates, ninety km southeast of Mari. Its remarkable rectilinear layout shows it to have been a planned city, a fortified stronghold built probably for a political and military purpose by the Babylonians, to help them maintain their hold on this stretch of the Euphrates. Rescue excavations took place between 1981 and 1984, when the site was threatened by the waters from a dam under construction at Haditha. In fact, the waters have not yet affected the site, and excavation continued through 1988.

The publication of this first volume of the excavation reports for the site of Haradum sheds welcome light on some obscure centuries in Syro-Mesopotamian history. The publication is admirable for its detailed coverage of the ancient environment and fauna, the architecture of the city, and the artifacts recovered, as well as for the explanatory text, placing the material remains and the history of the city as a whole in a...