Frans van Koppen*
The celebrated appearance of the city of Hazor and its king Ibni-Adad in the Mari archive has stimulated the idea that the kingdom was an important political power at that time. This assumption has been applied to the interpretation of archaeological data.
In the early days of the excavations at Hazor, it was used for the purpose of dating, as the Mari evidence was accepted as a synchronism between Mesopotamian chronology and a particular phase in the history of that site. For the excavator of Hazor, Y. Yadin, this could only have been the age when the city had become the most prominent power in the region, in his view the phase when also the lower town was occupied (e. g. Yadin 1972: 2-6). According to this interpretation, the Mari evidence offers a terminus ante quem for the establishment of the greater, fortified city of Hazor (upper city stratum XVII, lower city stratum 4). Yadin remarked on the implications of this position for the correlation between the archaeology-based chronology of the MB II Levant and the astronomy-based chronology of Babylon (Yadin 1972: 107-108), and the implications of his view were elaborated by A. Malamat (1992).
Many archaeologists have been reluctant to apply this premise for chronological purposes. The reasons for this are the persistent lack of consensus about absolute dates for Mesopotamian chronology of the second millennium BC (e. g. Dever 1992: 10-11; ILAN 1996: 244) and, more importantly, the fact that the correlation of the Mari references with the large stratum 4-3 city of Hazor has never been proven (e. g. iLAN 1996: 244; Maeir 1997: 321).
Recently the assumption of the political importance of Hazor on the basis of the textual evidence from Mari was used once again for archaeological interpretation, this time to argue that a regional pattern of material culture allows to recognize the area under political control of Hazor (Maeir 1997, 2000).
It is the purpose of this paper to re-evaluate the basic assumption underlying these interpretations - that the Mari sources are evidence for Hazor’s being an important political power at that time - by an examination of the political relations and historical events in the greater Syrian area of the Mari age. In the course of this discussion, an alternative interpretation for the observed regional culture will be proposed.
The Mari palace archive
The kingdom of Mari was situated at the crossroads between Syria, northern Mesopotamia and the southern alluvial plain and maintained diplomatic contact with partners from all these regions. This makes the palace archive an important source for the history of much of the ancient Near East in the early second millennium BC, even though it allows for little historical depth: the available texts represent those parts of the personal archive of king Zimri-Lim that were considered not relevant enough to be transported to Babylon when Hammurabi had conquered the city. The archive covers the thirteen years of the reign of zimri-Lim and includes also a selection of records from the time of his predecessors, Samsi-Addu of Ekallatum and his son Yasmah-Addu, the viceroy of Mari, mostly dating to the last years of their rule. In this way the archive offers dense, but incomplete documentation for a wide geographical horizon during a period of about twenty years (c. 1718-1698 BC).481 482
The royal archive of Mari is less helpful in providing information about the polities of the Levant, for this was the area of influence of the powerful kingdoms of Aleppo and Qatna, where Mariote embassies as a rule were not established, while the potentially rel-
Chronology; for a justification see below. The date of events that cannot be placed with precision in the relative Mesopotamian chronology (the beginning and end of the reign of Yahdun-Lim; the date of conquest of Mari by Samsi-Addu) is qualified accordingly; with the exception of the beginning of the reign of Yahdun-Lim, the chronological leeway is only a few years.
Evant letters of the kings of Aleppo and Qatna have not survived (Durand 1999: 153-154). The information about Hazor in the archive is therefore limited to references to the traffic of gifts and messengers; no letters sent from Hazor or devoted to events pertaining to that city can be expected in the archive, or have for that matter been found. Apart from a single attestation from the time of Samsi-Addu, Hazor appears only in records from the time of Zimri-Lim, but as the relevant text categories are nonexistent for the preceding reign, it is not clear whether this fact is at all meaningful. The Mari archive thus shows that Hazor partook in the long-distance diplomatic exchange, but the available sources are inadequate to understand the relations of this kingdom with other powers in the region or to appreciate historical developments.
World History
