Late Hittite Emar: The Chronology, Synchronisms, and Socio-Political Aspects of a Late Bronze Age Fortress Town.

• Author: Fleming, Daniel E.
• Position: Book Review

Late Hittite Emar: The Chronology, Synchronisms, and Socio-Political Aspects of a Late Bronze Age Fortress Town. By MURRAY ADAMTHWAITE. Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Supplement 8. Louvain: PEETERS, 2001. Pp. xxiii + 293, illus. [euro]70 (paper).

In this well-illustrated volume, Murray Adamthwaite has made important contributions to study of the cuneiform tablets from Late Bronze Age Emar. Emar was excavated during the mid-1970s by Jean-Claude Margueron, and its several hundred tablets were published capably by Daniel Arnaud in 1985-87. Since the excavations, various collections of tablets acquired on the antiquities market have proved to include large numbers of Emar texts. Some of them were demonstrably taken from the same building that yielded the majority of excavated tablets, the building [M.sub.1], the home of an overseer of much local Emar religious life, a man who took the title "diviner of the gods of Emar." The excavated tablets came from layers that were roughly contemporary with the heyday of excavated Ugarit in the thirteenth century B.C., when all of northern Syria had been taken over by the Hittite empire and was ruled from Carchemish. Adamthwaite gathers many strands of the Emar evidence that illuminate the town's place under Hittite rule. The effort is worthwhile but uneven, and flawed by what I believe is a misreading of Emar chronology.

Both my own work on Emar and Adamthwaite's suffer from bad timing, insofar as both appeared just as Uwe Finkbeiner and his colleagues proved that Margueron had only excavated the last phases of Bronze Age Emar, which turns out to have been located on the same site back through the Middle and Early Bronze. Adamthwaite occasionally draws larger conclusions from Margueron's hypothesis that the current site was only created after Hittite conquest. For example, he wonders whether thirteenth-century Emar had ceased to function as a major trading center, given that the new city had been built at a distance from the river (p. 79). It is now clear that this location was not a factor.

Late Hittite Emar is divided into three main parts, on chronology, on the relationship of local to imperial power, and on Emar's "internal history." The opening section on chronology is the most problematic, arguing in detail that all of the Late Bronze texts from Emar date to the thirteenth century, strictly defined. Adamthwaite's particular contribution to the chronological discussion is an extensive list of synchronisms that derive from a useful prosopographical study, anchored mainly to the reigns of thirteenth-century kings of Carchemish. His study of Emar names includes the local Emar kings, the eponyms in dated texts, the "mayors" (hazannu), the family of Zu-Ba'la the diviner, and various Hittite officials. There is a concentration of direct and indirect synchronisms with the reign of Ini-Tessub, who ruled Carchemish through about four decades of the mid-thirteenth century.

Before Adamthwaite, it had been widely agreed that Emar was destroyed in the 1180s, based on a Babylonian business transaction found at Emar dated to the second year of Melisipak (ca. 1187)...