Late Hittite Emar: The Chronology, Synchronisms, and Socio-political Aspects of a Late Bronze Age Fortress Town

Late Hittite Emar examines the economic and juridical texts from ancient Emar (modern Tell Meskene-Qadime) with a basically threefold task in view. The first is to discern the chronological span of the texts, and then using the political information of the texts to correlate the kings of Emar with the known kings of Karkemish in the thirteenth century B.C. The conclusion is that Emar fell to invaders considerably earlier than most have supposed to date. The second task looks at various aspects of Emar's social history, in particular whether the ilku-system operated there as at Ugarit, and more than thirty texts which attest both sale of family members and real estate "in a time of distress" (i.e. famine). It appears that Emar was left largely to run its own affairs under the Hittite aegis. Meanwhile, two leading families at Emar largely controlled the traffic in humanity, one being the entrenched clan of diviner-priests. The final section examines the attestation of Emar in earlier texts, from Ebla to Idri-mi, and concludes that there was no previous history of kingship at Emar. A text from the palace corpus which mentions an attempted coup d'etat against one of the Emarite kings receives close analysis, while the final chapter attempts an identification of the possible agents of Emar's destruction, with a particular focus on Aramaean activity in the region.