RITUAL REVISION AND THE INFLUENCE OF EMPIRE: THE POLITICS OF CHANGE IN THE ZUKRU FESTIVAL OF LATE BRONZE EMAR
by John Tracy Thames, Jr.
A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Baltimore, Maryland
October, 2016
© 2016 John Tracy Thames, Jr. All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT
Late Bronze Age Emar was a city in transition. The textual archives discovered at the site span a period when local governance was overtaken by the Hittite Empire, which only gradually developed a presence in Emar throughout the 13th century B.C.E. During this time, cultic specialists in Emar were engaged in a project of committing instructions for performing rituals to writing. Five of those documents record a city-wide ritual called zukru. Four of them are near-identical copies, relating a modest ritual engagement that may have occurred yearly. The fifth reflects an event of an altogether different scale, self- described as a septennial festival, with a level of extravagance unseen elsewhere in
Emarite ritual.
Studies of such prominent public events as the zukru tell us more than just details of religious practice. Following the work of ritual theorists who have investigated rituals as expressions of politics, this study offers a perspective on the zukru rituals as politically significant engagements not unrelated to the political transitions contemporary with their authorship. Changes in the rituals, such as those attested for the zukru ritual, may reflect alterations in the political landscape. Likewise, understanding their political settings helps us assess the significance of the rituals themselves. This study seeks such a comprehensive understanding of the zukru rituals by interpreting them first as religious phenomena, using comparative methods and ritual theory, and subsequently by reconstructing the political history of 13th-century Emar to reveal the rituals’ implications for Emarite politics and the policies of the Hittite authority based in nearby Karkamiš
(Carchemish).
ii The results of the study indicate that the festival form of the zukru was heavily influenced by the ritual sensibilities of the Hittite Empire, which took a political interest in Emar around the same time that it became a frontier city of the Assyrian Empire. The expansion of the zukru ritual into an elaborate festival occurred with the backing of the
Karkamiš authority as part of a broader program of support for Emar’s local monarchy and cultic service, apparently for the purpose of producing stability in the farthest reaches of the empire.
Advisor: P. Kyle McCarter, Jr.
Second Reader: Jacob Lauinger
Committee Chair: Nicolas Jabko
Readers: Daniel Fleming Theodore Lewis Paul Delnero William Rowe
iii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Politics of power are shaped in many less than obvious ways, perhaps none so fundamental to human experience than through ritual practice. Yet, the dimensions of ritualization and its dynamic properties are not routinely considered in historical assessments of political change, such as the emergence of empires. Consequently, our historical narratives of political domination in the ancient Near East lack an essential component for understanding fully, on the one hand, the nature of imperial infiltration in provincial territories and, on the other hand, the ways in which ritualization can be a means of negotiating social power. Likewise, a study of ritual is incomplete without as fully as possible taking into account the political, historical, and social factors that would have shaped its form and influenced the impact it would have produced for its participants. A goal of this research is to demonstrate both the profitability of studying ancient rituals for understanding contemporary politics and the advantages of seeking out the socio-political setting of ritual practice in order to best appreciate its significance.
The zukru rituals of Late Bronze Age Emar are particularly well suited for an investigation of this sort. They are public events, apparently involving the entire populace of Emar, sponsored by public institutions. And they attest to a shift in their manner of observation that appears to be connected to the dramatic political transitions underway in
13th-century B.C.E. Emar as a result of the increasing presence of Hittite imperial apparatuses in the city. Hence the zukru rituals give us the opportunity to pose questions whose answers may be less accessible in other types of ritual texts. What is the relationship between the variant versions of the zukru ritual and how may we account for its changes? What historical factors would have motivated the production of the zukru
iv texts in precisely the form we know them? Given what we know of Emarite government, with its traditionally modest monarchy, how can we explain the exorbitant injection of wealth into the zukru festival—absent in the non-festival version—on the part of the king? And, perhaps most important of all, how does the fact that Emar performed its public zukru while under the imperial umbrella of Hatti and, more immediately, the
Hittite viceregal kingdom of Karkamiš (Carchemish) inform us of Hittite/Karkamiš policy concerning Emar, its cult and its governing institutions?
Despite the fact that the Hittites conquered Emar already in the last third of the
14th century, their exercise of control in the region was slow and measured, occurring only when politically expedient. One such measure was an active involvement in support of Emar’s cults and the ritual activity associated with them, including the alteration and expansion of the zukru ritual. But why invest in provincial religious service without the possibility of material returns? The question of what the dominant power had to gain from its injection into Emar’s system of religious ritual and precisely how such benefits were achieved will be the driving question of the work that follows.