Emar

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Emar was an ancient city on the mid-Euphrates in northeastern Syria, at the site now marked by Tell Meskene. It has been the source of many cuneiform tablets, making it rank with Ugarit, Mari and Ebla among the most important archeological sites of Syria. In these texts, dating as far back as 2500 BC, and in excavations in several campaigns since the 1970s, Emar emerges as an important Bronze Age trade center, occupying a liminal position between the power centers of Upper Mesoptamia and Anatolia-Syria. Unlike other cities, the tablets preserved at Emar are not royal or official, but record private transactions, judicial records, dealings in real estate, marriages, last wills, formal adoptions. In the house of a priest, a library contained literary and lexical texts in the Mesopotamian tradition, and ritual texts for local cults.

The initial salvage excavations in advance of the rising waters of the Syrian Tabqa Dam project were undertaken by two French teams, in 1972-76. Excavations revealed a temple area comprising the sanctuaries of the weathergod Ba’al and possibly of his consort Astarte of the Late Bronze Age (thirteenth and early twelfth century BC).

After the conclusion of the French excavations the site was left unguarded and was systematically looted, bringing many cuneiform tablets onto the antiquities gray market stripped of their context. In 1992, the Syrian Antiquities Department took charge of the site, and a fresh series of campaigns revealed earlier strata, of the Middle and Early Bronze Ages (second half of the third millennium and the first half of the second millennium BC).

[edit] History

In the middle of the third millennium BC Emar came under the influence of the rulers of Ebla; the city is mentioned in archives at Ebla. In Mari texts eighteenth century BC, Middle Bronze Age) Emar was under the influence of the neighboring Amorite state of Yamhad. For the thirteenth and the early twelfth centuries BC (Late Bronze Age), there is written documentation from Emar itself, mostly in Akkadian, and also references in contemporaneous texts from Hattuša, Ugarit and in Assyrian archives; at the time Emar was within the Hittite sphere of influence, subject to the king of Carchemish, a Hittite client-king.

Archeological and written documentation come to an end in the later twelfth century BC. The site remained desolate at the unstable eastern borders of the Roman Empire, resettled as Barbalissos. In 253 it was the site of the Battle of Barbalissos between the Sassanid Persians under Shapur I and Roman troops. Its Byzantine history can be followed at Barbalissos.