Buch, Französisch, Band Volume 20, 490 Seiten
Mission archéologique de Meskéné-Emar. Recherches au pays d'Astata
Buch, Französisch, Band Volume 20, 490 Seiten
Reihe: Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis. Series Archaeologica
ISBN: 978-3-7278-1343-6
Verlag: Peeters Publishers
This work sets forth the important sigillographical material that was
brought to light during the salvage excavations at Meskéné, the site of
ancient Emar. These excavations were carried out during the 1970s, while
the Syrian authorities constructed the el-Assad dam in the Euphrates
loop. Emar, belonging to the country of Aßtata, had been moved and
refounded by the Hittites during the XIVth century BC when they
established their empire in northern Syria. An important number of
cuneiform tablets discovered there are dated from the end of the XIVth
to the beginning of the XIIth century BC. These records, mainly sale
contracts or testaments, have revealed hundreds of seal impressions,
generally those of witnesses of contractors, among them simple citizens
but also, naturally, civil servants, the city elders and even Emar’s
king and the god Ninurta.
The considerable interest of these records lies in the fact that they
fully enlighten the different currents of influence which met at this
cross-road at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and also their impact on
local traditions. Syrian, Babylonian, Mitannian iconography played an
important role. Still, the most outstanding element in XIIIth century BC
Emar is the Syro-Hittite style. This evolution was brutally interrupted
by the city’s downfall which occurred in c. 1180 BC when the Hittite
empire as a whole came to a sudden end.
