A region with margins : the Middle Euphrates

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This lecture is devoted to a particular region to the west of the Babylonian kingdom, stretching along what is known as the Middle Euphrates. It is currently cut by the Syrian-Iraqi border at Abu Kemal; it has suffered enormously in recent years, but had given rise to many interesting discoveries in the 1970s-90s. The downstream part of this area formed the Suhum region, with Yabliya as its capital. Further upstream was the kingdom of Hana, heir to the kingdom of Mari; Terqa is generally considered to have been its capital. The political frontier, which had by then stabilized at about the same level as today, did not prevent intense trade.

So we've started by bringing together what we now know about the Suhum region. Rapiqum (Tell Anbar^?) was located close to the point where the Euphrates, in the 2nd^millenniumB.C., left its deep valley and split into two branches; due to its strategic importance, this port city was long disputed between the various regional powers, notably Ešnunna and Babylon. 90 kmupstream lay the town of Hit, which formed the southernmost tip of the Suhum province. The modern name of the site is usually Ida or Ita, derived from bitumen(iṭṭûm), as this material outcrops on the surface in the vicinity of the city. This material, well documented in the Mari archives, is no longer attested in the late Paleo-Babylonian period. However, a group of texts relating to a barber-chief named Marduk-naṣir shows that under Samsu-ditana he organized trade expeditions to a place called Bit-Kašši ("House of the Kassites"); yet he alsoappears as a creditor in bitumen loan texts. This raises the question of whether Bit-Kašši was located close to Hit's bitumen sources.

Further upstream on the Euphrates, two Suhum towns are known from excavations, starting with Yabliya. As part of the construction of a new dam on the Euphrates at Khan al-Baghdadi, preventive excavations were carried out upstream. At Shishin, on the left bank 50 km upstream from Hit and 35 km downstream from the present-day town of Haditha, a fortress was discovered on a plateau 40 m above the river level; this is what the Mari texts call Yabliya Al-Kapim ("Yabliya, city of the cliff"), distinct from the town of Yabliya proper. The latter is to be found on the opposite bank of the Jodefiyeh tell, where surveys have revealed Palaeo-Babylonian occupation. Even further upstream, the site of Khirbet ed-Diniye was the subject of salvage excavations carried out during the construction of the Haditha dam, between 1981 and 1984: this was the ancient Harradum, a locality 90 km downstream from Mari, whose name had already been revealed in the archives. Recaptured from the kingdom of Hana in the year 26 of Samsu-iluna, Harradum remained under Babylonian control for a century, until its destruction in the year 18 of Ammi-ṣaduqa. The "House of Riš-Šamaš" has enabled us to engage in an exercise in micro-history: by combining the data from the 44 tablets discovered there with the text of a court case preserved in the British Museum, we have been able to reconstruct the family tree of the merchant family who lived there, and show how one of its branches moved to Babylon.

What was happening at the same time on the other side of the border? We saw last year that, at the time of the great revolt against Samsu-iluna, in years 8 to 10 of his reign, the kingdom of Mari was resurrected, still under the name of "Land of Hana", but with a capital that may have moved to Terqa, the present-day Tell Ashara, 70 kilometers upstream from Mari. In any case, this is the city we know about, through a mixture of texts discovered by chance and others from regular excavations. We began by outlining the chronological problems affecting the study of this kingdom neighbouring that of Babylon. Along the way, we proposed that the letter addressed to a certain Zimri-Lim, discovered in 2008 at Tell Sakka, on the outskirts of Damascus, and whose author is called Kaštiliašu, emanated from the Terqa king of that name. We then retraced what we know about the life of a^17th-centuryTerqa district, located around a temple dedicated to the goddess Ninkarrak. This modest sanctuary was excavated; in a pit, over 5,000 carnelian beads were discovered, originally to be enclosed in a leather bag, which also contained 17 scarabs. These Egyptian objects from the Levant make it even more likely that the Terqa king Kaštiliaš was in epistolary contact with a Zimri-Lim living in a palace at Tell Sakka in the Damascus region. The Terqa houses around the Ninkarrak temple yielded archives enabling the history of four families to be reconstructed, including that of the chief barber Gimil-Ninkarrak.

The 12th excavation^campaignin 1989 led to the discovery of two jars on the slope of the Ashara tell (sector E), containing some thirty tablets, two of which were dated by Ammi-ṣaduqa and Samsu-ditana. The sequence of local kings for a century thus seems to have been: Yadih-abum, then Kaštiliaš, Šunuhru-Ammu and the latter's son, Ammi-madar. Terqa would then have lost its independence, coming under the thumb of Babylon for a few years with Ammi-ṣaduqa and Samsu-ditana.

The lecture concluded with two important observations. The first was the maintenance in the 17th^centuryof long-distance relations throughout the Near East, even if they are less well documented than in the previous century: we saw how the people of Harradum had links with Emar or Aššur, those of Terqa with Damascene and the Levant. We can also see how porous the western frontier of the Babylonian kingdom was. Its kings made several attempts to annex the kingdom of Hana, or at least to control it; the texts of the practice bear witness to Babylon's cultural influence.