The king and I: a Mari king in changing perceptions.

• Author: Sasson, Jack M.

The "king" about whom I speak lived almost four thousand years ago, and he was not particularly distinguished. He generated no new paradigms for dominion, imposed no dynastic principles, built no enduring monuments, instigated no new social movements of which we are aware, and, thank God, launched no new religions. No poet sang his praise posthumously, and no legend was built around his deeds.(1) Yet, I would not call him insignificant, if only because in his lifetime many thought he could be their passport to happiness. I want to tell you something about him; but I also want to use him to comment on the drive we share as custodians of the past to bridge gaps and complete stories.

The king of my title is Zimri-Lim, and in the early eighteenth century B.C.E. he ruled at Mari, now just a tell on the right bank of the Euphrates, about fifty kilometers north of the present Iraqi-Syrian border. I first met with Zimri-Lim in the early 1960s. I was a graduate student at Brandeis then and, frankly, I was delighted to learn that although Zimri-Lim was fluent in Akkadian and Amorite, he communicated also in French, the language of his editors. And when I further learned that his queen came from my own birthplace, Aleppo [Halab], he seemed so much like folks with whom I grew up that I could not imagine him keeping any secrets from me.

In those days, I felt certain that my upbringing in Aleppo and Beirut gave me a special entry into the past. Lexical affinities fed this allusion. Had I not prepared for life as a tupsarrum, Akkadian for scribe, when as a child in Beirut I wrote on the board with a tabshur, a piece of chalk? Was I not instructed in adab, "culture," just as ancient scribes apprenticed in their edubba-schools?

There were other, seemingly more compelling, epiphanies, such as when reading about legal procedures from Mesopotamia brought to my mind the saga of a distant aunt sent out naked from the divorce chamber.(2) Or when, upon learning that Old Babylonian grooms presented their brides handsome gifts heaped on platters, I recalled the sweni ("trays"), similarly lavish celebrations (Greengus 1966: 59-61).

Such conjunctions of words and practices were, of course, as false as they were benign, with only the same approximate sound or landscape in common; yet through them, I sought reciprocally to quicken the life of two lifeless cultures, one Mesopotamian and remote, the other Judaeo-arabic and surviving now only between the covers of Claudia Roden's highly recommended recent book (1996) on Sephardi food. But Western scholarship, alas, distances researchers from their subjects, and the illusion could not long endure. Still, as the world I was studying became more remote, Zimri-Lim was there to ease the parting.

The French were governing Syria when, in the late 1920s, they began to excavate Tell Hariri, initiating the resurrection of a town whose death was rehearsed in the records of Hammurabi of Babylon. Within a decade, the broad outline of Mari's history had been sketched. The city has had roots deep into the fourth millennium and its rulers had actively shaped third-millennium regional history. But its archives shed the brightest light on one century of the Old Babylonian period that ended around 1760. A series of articles published before World War II provided basic information about Zimri-Lim. In 1936, Francois Thureau-Dangin established Yahdun-Lim as the king's father and proved that he was Hammurabi's contemporary (Thureau-Dangin 1936).(3) In 1937, Georges Dossin, who headed the Mari epigraphic team until 1981, quoted a passage that ranked Zimri-Lim very high among the power brokers of his day (Dossin 1937: 17-18). That same year, Thureau-Dangin cited a text (later fully published as ARM 1 3) proving that during a long interval between Yahdun-Lira and Zimri-Lim, Mari was first ruled briefly by a shadowy figure named Sumu-Yamam and then by Yasmah-Addu, who was placed on the throne by his father, a grizzled warrior named Samsi-Addu (Thureau-Dangin 1937). When in 1939 Thureau-Dangin published clay labels bearing Hammurabi's date-formulas, Zimri-Lim's position as Mari's last ruler was confirmed (Thureau-Dangin 1939).

So as the storms were gathering over Europe, much had come to be known about Zimri-Lim. Archaeological reports were proving how exceptional was his palace. Scholars knew about his lineage and they recognized that his rise to the throne was turbulent, that he enjoyed prestige in his own days, and that his end was violent. Still lacking was information about his apprenticeship, the length of his rule, and details of his personal life. It was not until 1949 that Dossin established the Aleppo origin of Queen Siptu. Soon afterward, he quoted a letter in which Zimri-Lim reminded his Aleppo father-in-law of the aid he gave in regaining the Mari throne (Dossin 1952; full edition 1973: see Appendix).

With these added details, a biography of Zimri-Lim was emerging that was surprisingly satisfying and complete, although it was commonly delivered as a page from period history. This reconstruction was shaped by a wide cast of scholars, including such A.O.S. stalwarts as William Albright, Albrecht Goetze, and Hildegard Lewy; but I give you its gist from the pen of Andre Parrot, the man who first excavated Mari.

In a Seance publique annuelle des cinq academies, Parrot sketched the life of a chief of state (Parrot 1966). To Parrot, the Mari documents supplied us with the name of the ruler Hammurabi boasted of defeating when, in his thirty-fifth year-name, he recorded the destruction of Mari. The victim was Zimri-Lim, and he had had a tough life. Surviving his father's assassination, the young prince found refuge in the Aleppo of King Yarim-Lim. His exile there ended twenty years later, when he defeated the usurper Yasmah-Addu. Then, for over thirty years he ruled from his palace, a city within a city, where every sector had its proper function, the whole protected by massive walls. For Parrot, Zimri-Lim was an enlightened despot, a "powerful and noble chief of state," who tirelessly prodded administrators to fulfill their duty (p. 11). His power was absolute, with political as well as sacerdotal dimensions; but he remained accessible to petitioners, visitors, and tribal leaders. Among them, Parrot imagined, were Benjaminite chieftains, kin to Terah and Abraham, in transit toward Haran (p. 8). To escape, the king would hie to a corner of the palace. (To his credit, Parrot avoids the term "harem.") There, among other wives and concubines, he would find Siptu, a queen capable of writing one of the most ardent love letters from antiquity.

But virtue and hard work (as we all know) rarely protect from covetous neighbors. For Parrot, Hammurabi of Babylon was a Machiavellian ally, striving for hegemony. Mari stood in the way and was conquered. The victorious Babylonian humiliated Zimri-Lim by forcing examination of his correspondence. Stung, Zimri-Lim tried to break Babylon's yoke, but failed. Hammurabi turned implacable. Mass executions took place outside the city walls. As columns of slaves made their way to Babylon, Hammurabi razed the palace and burned it. Parrot did not speculate on Zimri-Lim's fate, but opined that in the looted Mari palace just enough was left behind to attest to Zimri-Lim's power and nobility (p. 11).

Given its public setting, Parrot's presentation was bound to be hyperbolic. Yet, his story was but a less obsessively academic version of what then obtained in learned journals. What he offered, of course, is not history, even by Voltaire's minimalist definition of history as "a panorama of crimes and misery."(4) And neither is it sober biography, because it lacks the self-conscious compromises with historical methodologies that normally occur in the academic version of that genre. But it is history as moral drama, a decent, even commendable, exemplum of a responsibly held kingship. And Parrot crafted it with balance and empathy, bracketing a whole life within two defining massacres; the first, initiating Zimri-Lim's exile, explains his resolve and teaches the value of fortitude; the second, ending his reign, warns about villainy, but also suggests the mystery of theodicy. It is therefore reminiscent of the melodramatic biblical portraits of Moses, Jacob, and David, the lives from Plutarch and Suetonius, the tarjamas about learned Muslims, and countless medieval lives. What they all share is a plot that follows the subject from youth to death, even when offering details selectively. The plot itself underscores the singularity of the subject's achievement; and in doing so, it makes frequent yet unobtrusive conjunctions among biographer, subject, and audience.

I feel sure that Parrot, consciously or otherwise, accented these aspects of the paradigm, not because they would confer antiquity or nobility on his story, but because of the uncanny, deja entendu familiarity of the pattern. You should therefore not be surprised to find the story, with its echoes of the "juste souffrant" theme, repeated more or less whole in some of the latest and most sophisticated rehearsals of what went on in Old Babylonian Mari (Kuhrt 1995: 98-100; Klengel 1992: 55). Even Parrot's reluctance to speculate on Zimri-Lim's personal fate was a positive touch, for it fed our hopes that among the unpublished documents evidence for a merciful end to Zimri-Lim's life would yet be found. On this expectant note, let us shift to the next phase of studies on Zimri-Lim, which I place between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s. It is during this phase that the king and I had our closest encounters.

Volumes of edited documents from the reign of Zimri-Lim had begun to appear in a cluster during the early 1950s. Dossiers of administrators, such as provincial governors, palace stewards, and heads of storehouses, were joined by a collection of juridical documents and by four large volumes containing hundreds of economic...