For over 40 years, Jack M. Sasson has been studying and
commenting on the cuneiform archives from Mari on the Euphrates
River, especially those from the age of Hammurabi of Babylon. Among
Mari's ...wealth of documents, some of the most interesting are
letters from and to kings, their advisers and functionaries, their
wives and daughters, their scribes and messengers, and a variety of
military personnel. The letters are revealing and often poignant.
Sasson selects more than 700 letters as well as several excerpts
from administrative documents, translating them and providing them
with illuminating comments. In distilling a lifetime of study and
interpretation, Sasson hopes to welcome readers into a fuller
appreciation of a remarkable period in Mesopotamian
civilization.
Sasson's presentation is organized around major institutions in
an ancient culture: (1) Kingship , treating
accumulation of wealth, control of vassals, dynastic marriages,
treaty-obligations, as well as illustrating the hazards and
vexation of ruling a large territory; (2)
Administration , from palaces that teem with bureaucrats,
musicians, and cooks, to the management of provinces and vassal
kingdoms; (3) Warfare , military establishment and
martial practices; (4) Society , including organs
of justice (and shortcuts to it), crime, punishment, and civil
transactions; (5) Religion, including notices on
diverse pantheons, rituals, priesthood, cultic paraphernalia, vows,
ordeals, and channels to the gods (divination, dreams, and
prophecy); and (6) Culture , including ethnic
distinctions, class structure, and moments in the life cycle
(birth, childhood, family life, health matters, death, and
commemoration).
Sasson's presentation of the material brings to life a world
entombed for four millennia, concretizes the realities of ancient
life, and gives it a human perspective that is at once instructive
and entertaining.
The book is accompanied by extensive concordances and indexes
(including to biblical passages) that will be useful to those who
wish to study the letters more intensively.
Democracy's Ancient Ancestors was first published in 2004. It examines the political landscape of the ancient Near East through the archive of over 3000 letters found in the royal palace of Mari. ...These letters display a rich diversity of political actors, encompassing major kingdoms, smaller states and various tribal towns. Mari's unique contribution to the ancient evidence is its view of tribal organization, made possible especially by the fact that its king Zimri-Lim was first of all a tribal ruler, who claimed Mari as an administrative base and source of prestige. These archaic political traditions are not essentially unlike the forms of pre-democratic Greece, and they offer fresh reason to recognize a cultural continuity between the classical world of the Aegean and the older Near East. This book bridges several areas of interest, including archaeology, ancient and classical history, early Middle and Near East, and political and social history.
According to archaeological evidence gleaned over more than 70 years, Mari appears to have been the most important city in northern Mesopotamia from its foundation at about 2950 BC to 1760 BC. ...Situated at the heart of a river system and progressively linked with an overland network, Mari was the city that controlled the relations of central and southern Mesopotamia with the regions bordering the Taurus and Zagros mountains to the north and east and the Mediterranean coastal zone to the west. Mari drew its power from this situation, and the role it played accounts for the particularity of its features, positioned as it was between the Syrian, Assyrian, Iranian, Babylonian and Sumerian worlds. The evidence shows that there was not one city of Mari, but three successive cities, each having specific features, although there is a striking permanence in the original forms. The first, City I, founded in about 2950 BC, was based on remarkable principles of city planning, including a broad regional development with the creation of canals for irrigation and transport, one more than 120 km long. In the 23rd century BC City II was founded using impressive technology in city planning. Probably destroyed by Naram-Sin of Akkad about 2200 BC, it was entirely reconstructed as City III by a new dynasty, the Shakkanakku. In the 19th century BC this was replaced by an Amorite dynasty, which ruled until Hammurabi of Babylon destroyed Mari in 1760 BC. The diversity of the information and material that has been recovered confirms Mari’s place as one of the best sources for understanding the brilliant Mesopotamian civilisation that developed between the beginning of the 3rd and the end of the 1st millennium BC.
According to archaeological evidence gleaned over more than 70 years, Mari appears to have been the most important city in northern Mesopotamia from its foundation at about 2950 BC to 1760 BC. ...Situated at the heart of a river system and progressively linked with an overland network, Mari was the city that controlled the relations of central and southern Mesopotamia with the regions bordering the Taurus and Zagros mountains to the north and east and the Mediterranean coastal zone to the west. Mari drew its power from this situation, and the role it played accounts for the particularity of its features, positioned as it was between the Syrian, Assyrian, Iranian, Babylonian and Sumerian worlds.The evidence shows that there was not one city of Mari, but three successive cities, each having specific features, although there is a striking permanence in the original forms. The first, City I, founded in about 2950 BC, was based on remarkable principles of city planning, including a broad regional development with the creation of canals for irrigation and transport, one more than 120 km long. In the 23rd century BC City II was founded using impressive technology in city planning. Probably destroyed by Naram-Sin of Akkad about 2200 BC, it was entirely reconstructed as City III by a new dynasty, the Shakkanakku. In the 19th century BC this was replaced by an Amorite dynasty, which ruled until Hammurabi of Babylon destroyed Mari in 1760 BC. The diversity of the information and material that has been recovered confirms Mari's place as one of the best sources for understanding the brilliant Mesopotamian civilisation that developed between the beginning of the 3rd and the end of the 1st millennium BC.
This article serves as an introduction to the historical phenomenon of prophecy in the Ancient Levant and Old Babylonian Mari. Of particular focus is the terminology for prophetic personnel, prophecy ...as a system of communication, the link between prophecy and monarchy at Mari, and the question of biblical prophetic books and their relationship to prophetic practice. The ancient evidence is surveyed in an effort to elucidate a comparative investigation across the Ancient Near East. This includes narratives and books in the Hebrew Bible, and extra‐biblical sources from the sites of Lachish and Deir 'Alla in the larger Levant. Additionally, the Old Babylonian archives of the 18th century BCE kingdom of Mari (Tell Hariri, Syria) illuminate how prophecy is part of a larger system of royal correspondence in antiquity. The article offers the most up‐to‐date literature on prophecy at Mari and also introduces new work on third‐party intermediaries, those individuals who relay prophets' messages to their recipients.
This book analyzes Zimri-Lim's interactions with sovereigns from the Habur and with Yamut-bal and Numha tribal polities. It describes how Zimri-Lim's disproportionate dependence on tribal connections ...left him vulnerable when these alliances began to falter in his tenth regnal year.
במאמר זה אנו דנים בשאלה הנוגעת לעקרונות היסוד של החוק הפלילי במקרא: האם מדובר במושכלות ראשונים שעליהם מבוססים חוקי המקרא (כפי שהציע בשעתו משה גרינברג), או שמא עקרונות מעין אלה הם ביטוי מאוחר המסכם ...נוהג משפטי קדום? אנו בוחנים שאלה זו תוך השוואה למקורות מסופוטמיים שקדמו בכאלף שנה לקובצי החוק שבמקרא — שני מכתבים מהמאה הי"ח לפנה"ס שנמצאו בעיר מארי לגדת הפרת התיכון וחוזה משפטי מהמאה הי"ט לפנה"ס בין שתי ערים מאזור הדיאלה. על אף פערי הזמן והמקום בין מקורות אלה לקובצי החוק שבמקרא, קווי הדמיון התרבותיים והחברתיים בין שבטי האמורים בצפון מסופוטמיה ובין עם ישראל בתקופת המקרא מעמידים את הדיון בין תפיסות החוק והמשפט בקרב שתי קבוצות אלה על אדנים יציבים. השוואתנו מראה, כי לפחות אחד מעקרונות היסוד של חוקי המקרא, כפי שניסח אותם גרינברג — ערכם המוחלט של חיי האדם, השולל אפשרות של פיצויי ממון במקרים של דיני נפשות — בא לידי ביטוי כבר בנוהגי המשפט שהתקיימו באוכלוסיות האמורים. מסתבר, אפוא, כי נוהגי משפט אלה, כמו גם נוהג גאולת הדם הכרוך בהם, היו חלק ממורשתו השמית הצפון־מערבית של ישראל הקדום, וזיקוקם לכדי עקרון יסוד העומד בפני עצמו הוא תהליך היסטורי מאוחר יחסית.
In this article, we discuss a question bearing on the fundamental principles of criminal law in the Hebrew Bible: are they self-standing postulates on which the biblical laws are based (as suggested by Moshe Greenberg), or late generalizations made from specific legal norms and statements which predate them? We address this question by considering Mesopotamian documents about a millennium older than the biblical legal corpora – two 18th-century BCE letters found in Mari on the Middle Euphrates, and a 19th-century BCE treaty between two towns in the Diyala basin. Despite the spatial and temporal distance between these sources and the biblical legal corpora, the social and cultural similarities between the Amorite populations of northern Mesopotamia and the Ancient Israel as reflected in the Hebrew Bible justify a comparison between the legal norms and practices in these two societies. Our discussion shows that at least one of the postulates of biblical law formulated by Greenberg – the absolute value of human life, which rules out monetary compensation in capital cases – finds expression in the legal practices of the Amorite tribes. Accordingly, we conclude that those legal practices, as well as the norm of blood revenge which is clearly connected to them, were inherited by Ancient Israel from its Northwest Semitic background, and their crystallization into a fundamental legal principle was a result of a later historical process.
The Hebrew lexeme taḥaš, which designates one of the materials of the outer layer of the priestly tent sanctuary, has puzzled interpreters for hundreds of years. This article surveys the recent ...discussion of the term and provides evidence in favor of a parallel to the Akkadian duḫšum/tuḫšum. So far overlooked in this discussion is the functional parallel between the use of Hebrew taḥaš for the covering of the tent sanctuary and the use of tuḫšum at Mari for the covering of a large, royal tent structure (ḫurpatum). Buttressing the phonological and functional parallel between Hebrew taḥaš and Mari duḫšum/tuḫšum are a series of other terminological connections between Mari's ḫurpatum, the tent-dwelling of Ugaritic ʾIlu, and the Israelite priestly tent sanctuary.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
