Following the Man of Yamhad Culture and History of the Ancient Near East

Following the Man of Yamhad Culture and History of the Ancient Near East Founding Editor M.H.E. Weippert Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Stökl Editors Eckart Frahm W. Randall Garr Baruch Halpern Theo P.J. van den Hout Leslie Anne Warden Irene J. Winter VOLUME 75 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/chan Following the Man of Yamhad Settlement and Territory at Old Babylonian Alalah By Jacob Lauinger LEIDEN | BOSTON This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1566-2055 isbn 978-90-04-29093-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29289-5 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. 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For my parents ∵ Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xiv List of Figures xvi List of Tables xvii Abbreviations xviii 1 Introduction 1 Aims of the Book 1 Land Tenure 7 Terminology 9 The Responsibilities of Owning a Settlement 13 Previous Research on Owning Settlements 17 What was a Settlement? 17 What Rights Did the Owner of a Settlement Enjoy? 25 Excursus: The Word Teqnītum 32 Structure of the Book 34 2 Tablets and Archives 36 Introduction 36 The Corpus of Level vii Tablets 37 Defining the Corpus 38 Publication History and Status 39 Genre 41 Archives 44 The Chronological Distribution of the Tablets 50 3 Four Case Studies 57 Introduction 57 Awirraše 59 Kunuwe 76 Murar 85 Emar 101 Conclusion 111 viii contents 4 L’affaire d’Alahtum 113 Introduction 113 The Letters Concerning Alahtum and Their Themes 115 The Purchase of Alahtum and the Organization of Its Population 118 Gašera’s Complaint 122 The Ugārum of Alahtum 126 Conclusion 131 5 Conditions of Tenure 133 Introduction 133 AlT 1 [10.01], AlT 456 [10.02], and Genre 135 AlT 1 [10.01] as the Copy of an Inscription 137 AlT 456 [10.02] and Contracts for the Acquisition of Settlements 141 The Historical Narratives of AlT 1 [10.01] and 456 [10.02] 153 Conclusion: Revocable and Irrevocable Tenure 156 6 Yarim-Lim’s Domain 162 Introduction 162 The Historical Geography of AlT 456 [10.02] 163 The Territorial Kingdom of Alalah-Mukiš in the Late Bronze Age 164 Yarim-Lim I’s Landholdings before the Rebellion 166 Yarim-Lim I’s Landholdings after the Rebellion 172 Territorial Noncontiguity 182 Conclusion 185 7 Conclusion 187 Summary and Synthesis 187 Interpretive Frameworks 192 A Network of Nodes and Corridors? 193 A Province or a Personal Estate? 195 An “Amorite” Polity? 196 Appendix 1 The Chronology of Level Vii Alalah 201 Introduction 201 When Did Level Vii Begin? 201 When Did Level Vii End? 203 How Many Generations of the Kings of Yamhad are Attested in the Level Vii Texts? 208 contents ix How Many Generations of the Rulers of Alalah are Attested in the Level Vii Texts? 214 Conclusion 225 Appendix 2 Data Sets 228 Detailed Summary of the Level Vii Documentation on Settlements and Other Immovable Property 228 The Corpus of Level Vii Texts 231 Appendix 3 Editions of Translated Level Vii Texts 276 AlT 1 [10.01] 276 AlT 7 [20.01] 284 AlT 7A [20.01A] 293 AlT 11 [20.05] 299 AlT 11A [20.05A] 303 AlT 33 [30.05] 307 AlT 41 [20.06] 311 AlT 42 [30.10] 313 AlT 52 [22.01] 314 AlT 53 [22.02] 316 AlT 53A [22.02A] 318 AlT 54 [22.03] 318 AlT 55 [22.04] 320 AlT 56 [22.05] 325 AlT 58 [22.06] 329 AlT 63 [22.11] 332 AlT 64 [22.12] 334 AlT 78 [23.05] 336 AlT 79 [23.03] 337 AlT 96 [21.04] 340 AlT 98d [22.13] 344 AlT 119 [51.03] 348 AlT 120 [51.04] 350 AlT 270 [60.01] 352 AlT 271 [43.04] 356 AlT 320 [43.02] 359 AlT 321 [43.03] 360 AlT 322 [30.12] 361 AlT 348 [42.12] 362 x contents AlT 357 [42.13] 364 AlT 368 [51.05] 366 AlT 455 [20.08] 368 AlT 456 [10.02] 373 UF 36: 81 [20.10] 390 UF 36: 96 [21.05] 391 UF 36: 123 [22.15] 393 UF 36: 125 [22.19] 395 UF 36: 136–37 [23.06+23.06A] 397 UF 38: 121 [43.12] 399 References 401 Index of Texts 422 Index of Words Discussed 434 Index of Proper Nouns 440 Preface In my 2007 dissertation, I used then-unpublished field cards from Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Tell Atchana, ancient Alalah, to reconstruct the find- spots of the majority of the cuneiform tablets from Level VII Alalah and to analyze the assemblages that they formed from an archival perspective. (The basic data of the dissertation, together with transcriptions of the field cards and an investigation of the possibility of sequential excavation numbers reflecting tablets found in spatial proximity, have now been published as Lauinger 2011a.) Among the more immediately intriguing Level VII tablets that I worked with in the course of reconstructing the archives were contracts recording the purchase or exchange of settlements. In my dissertation, I followed scholarly con- sensus in assuming that acquiring a settlement granted the “owner” the right to receive “taxes” from the settlement (e.g., p. 224). After completing my dissertation, I decided to test this assumption, and the present book is the result. I hope that the reader emerges convinced that owning settlements involved more direct management than has been assumed. The years since I completed my dissertation have seen important advances in the study of the cuneiform tablets from Level VII Alalah, most importantly Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz’s (2004a, 2005, 2006) long awaited reedi- tions of the texts originally published by Donald Wiseman, and their new editions of the texts and fragments that remained unpublished at the time. Despite the bibliographic dates of publication, the three articles did not appear until 2006, 2007, and 2008, and so I was able to incorporate only the first article into my 2007 dissertation. In this book, I have been able to engage fully with all three articles, which I am convinced will remain a fundamental starting point for anyone interested in the Level VII tablets for generations to come. In order to allow the reader to more readily identify both the original edition of a Level VII text and its reedition, I cite the relevant Level VII texts by Wiseman’s (1953) catalog number and the new numbering system used by Dietrich and Loretz, e.g., AlT 1 [10.01]. In the years since I finished my dissertation, I have made it my goal to per- sonally collate as many Level VII tablets as I could, and I repeat my gratitude to the persons and institutions named in the Acknowledgments who gave me the opportunities to do so. The only Level VII tablets that I have not been able to inspect are the six that were given to the collection of the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Melbourne (AlT 21 [31.03], 243 [41.01], 262 [41.67], 335 [43.05], 379 [43.01], 413 [40.04]) and a few tablets in the Hatay Archaeological Museum that were on display or otherwise not available to me during my several visits xii preface (AlT 6 [21.01], 32 [30.04], 252 [41.09], 269 [41.35], 271 [43.04], 281 [41.78], 384 [50.04], 388 [50.09], 455 [20.08]). I have had to rely on photographs to study all but one of these tablets, and I am grateful to Murat Akar, Manfried Dietrich, and Mark Weeden for either taking photographs at my request or making available to me photographs in their possession.1 I include editions of those Level VII texts that are central to my arguments in this book. Translations of these texts appear in the body of the text where the texts are discussed. Transliterations and commentaries to texts translated in this way appear in Appendix 3. In the translations, I indicate restored text with brackets, but I do not indicate damaged text (i.e., signs marked with half brackets in transliteration). Although I insert hyphens between the words comprising proper nouns when I believe I grasp a name’s meaning, I have not indicated vowel length in either personal names or toponyms. Echoing Michalowski’s (2011: 3 n. 2) paraphrase of Charpin and Ziegler (2003: vi), this is a book about social and economic history, not onomastics. In my translations, I do not include the names of the witnesses listed at the end of legal texts. If the identities of the witnesses are important to the arguments I advance, I dis- cuss them in the body of the text; readers may consult the relevant transliterations in Appendix 3 for other witness lists that interest them.

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