ALALAKH Ignacio Márquez Rowe Alalakh, Modern Tell Atchana, Lies
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ANATOLIA AND THE LEVANT ALALAKH Ignacio Márquez Rowe Alalakh, modern Tell Atchana, lies on the direct road between Aleppo and the Mediterranean, in the Amuq plain, which today occupies the major part of the Turkish province of the Hatay. The seven seasons of excavations at Tell Atchana that Sir Leonard Woolley conducted in 1937–39 and 1946–49 yielded over five hun- dred cuneiform tablets, most of them written in Akkadian. The majority of the tablets come from two royal archives unearthed at two distinct levels and belong accordingly to two different his- torical periods. The older archive, which includes about 35 percent of the excavated texts, was discovered in the Level VII palace and is dated to the late Old Babylonian period. More than half of the Alalakh written material was found in the more recent archive, in the Level IV palace and fortress, which is dated to the fifteenth century.1 A. A L VII 1. Sources of Law 1.1 The sources of the period under discussion (in historical terms, late Old Babylonian; in archaeological terms, late Middle Bronze Age) extend from the installation of Yarim-Lim as ruler of Alalakh by his elder brother Abban, Great King of Yamkhad (Aleppo), to the destruction of the town, presumably by the Hittite king Hattusili I. 1.2 The extant corpus of legal documents from Alalakh VII in- cludes about ten documents that are concerned with litigation, one 1 The basic edition of the texts remains Wiseman’s The Alalakh Tablets. It should be noted that a few tablets are still unpublished or only partially published; see the provisional list in Hess, “A Preliminary List...” 694 deposition, twenty-seven loan documents, thirteen documents of sale and five of barter, and two deeds of gift. 1.3 The contracts are drafted in objective style, usually followed by a list of witnesses and the date. (Year names correspond to the Yamkhad date formulas.) Seals (and occasionally hems of garments) of the party under obligation as well as witnesses were as a rule impressed not on the tablets themselves but on their envelopes, of which only a few, mostly fragmentary examples, have been found.2 1.4 In addition to legal documents, several administrative records such as debt notes or ration lists shed important light on legal prac- tice in late Middle Bronze Age Alalakh. 1.5 The parties to the transactions and in litigation are mostly drawn from the circle of the royal court: the rulers themselves, their family members, officials, and other influential persons. 2. Constitutional and Administrative Law 2.1 Organs of Government 2.1.1 The King3 In this period, Alalakh was part of the kingdom of Yamkhad. We know from AT 1 and AT 456 that Abban, king of Yamkhad, had assigned to his younger brother Yarim-Lim the province of Alalakh as his “share” (zittum; cf. AT 456:38, AT 95:obv. 18), transmitted by inheritance (AT 6), with the responsibility for governing it and the obligation to preserve the unity of and loyalty to the kingdom of Aleppo. As a result of this agreement, the question whether Yarim- Lim and his successors should be called governors rather than kings is of minor importance. The authority of the rulers of Alalakh over their territory was clearly bounded by the sovereignty of Aleppo. Indeed, the overlord of Yamkhad (e.g., AT 7, AT 9, AT 95, or AT 455) or his officials (e.g., AT 8) are found presiding over transactions within the juris- 2 See Collon, The Seal Impressions . ., 139ff. 3 See Klengel, “Königtum und Palast . .,” and “Die Palastwirtschaft . .”; Bunnens, “Pouvoirs locaux...”.