A region with margins : the Middle Euphrates

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-century Terqa 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^campaign in 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^century of 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.