Abstract
The site of Chagar Bazar, tell located in North-East Syria, in the center of the Habur triangle, in the Upper Jezira region, is well known from the excavations carried out by Sir Max Mallowan between 1935 and 1937. It was on this occasion that the first tablets in this region were discovered. After a long hiatus, a new joint archaeological mission resumed work in the field between 1999 and 2011, involving the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums and the archaeological mission of the University of Liège in Syria led by Professor Önhan Tunca.
All the documents discovered between 2000 and 2002 have been published in Ö. Tunca & A. Baghdo (eds), Chagar Bazar (Syria) III. Les trouvailles épigraphiques et sigillographiques du chantier I (2000-2002), Publications de la Mission archéologique de l'Université de Liège en Syrie, Leuven, Paris and Dudley (MA) : Peeters Publishers, 2008.
New tablets were discovered from 2005 onwards, and among the new documents found since 2007, some twenty tablets and fragments of administrative texts of beer rations are dated to the eponymous Ennam-Aššur. Thanks to the Kültepe Eponym List (KEL G), we know that there was an eponym Ennam-Aššur (KEL G 84), which gave its name to the year following Samsī-Addu's death at the end of Ṭāb-ṣilli-Aššur.
This paper will first present new data derived in particular from unpublished texts from Chagar Bazar (ancient Ašnakkum), followed by the results of a confrontation with documentation from Mari. Finally, on the basis of these new data, we will attempt to reconstruct the plot of historical events that took place in the year that saw the disintegration of the Samsī-Addu empire.
