The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia
Cultures in Contact
From Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean in the Second Millennium B.C.
Edited by
Joan Aruz, Sarah B. Graff, and Yelena Rakic
the metropolitan museum of art, new distributed by yale university press, new haven
-2LOI3
york
and london
Glenn M. Schwartz
An Amorite Global Village: Syrian— Mesopotamian Relations in the Second Millennium B.C.
When considering Syria and Mesopotamia in antiquity, scholars have often conceptualized the relationship between the two regions in terms of asymmetry, of center and periphery. Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, is celebrated as the birthplace and heartland of cities and civilization. Syria, in contrast, seems to be in the shadow of its formidable neighbor to the southeast politically, culturally, and economically. An asymmetric relationship between the two regions can be seen as far back as the Ubaid period in the fifth millennium b.c., when Mesopotamian pottery and other material culture were adopted all over Syria, eastern Anatolia, and western Iran. While the participants in a recent symposium on the Ubaid culture emphasized the autonomy of the non-Mesopotamians in determining which (if any) Ubaid material-culture styles to adopt, it still must be acknowledged that the process was unidirectional, from southern Mesopotamia to the north.1 In the Uruk expansion of the fourth millennium b.c., Mesopotamian material culture proliferated over the same considerable area but with a greater diversity of types and with evidence of urban colonization.2 The late
third millennium b.c. brought yet another Mesopotamian incursion, this time of a military character, in which Sargon of Akkad and his successors ransacked and apparently subjugated a good part of Syria, particularly in the Jezireh.3 These episodes of expansion are usually understood to have been economically motivated, with Mesopotamia extracting natural resources such as metals, timber, and stone from its neighbors. Certainly, a diversity of raw materials was available from the regions encircling Mesopotamia, while Mesopotamia itself was bereft of most of the natural resources necessary for luxury goods and even some essentials.4 Nevertheless, other factors are also likely to have been significant, with ideology not the least of these.5
In recent years, this pattern of a Mesopotamian core acting upon its passive Syrian periphery has come under increasing critical scrutiny.6 Research has shown that the relationships between Mesopotamia and its neighbors were neither as one-sided nor as asymmetric as was first thought. We are more attentive now to the agency exercised by people in the so-called peripheries, who made their own decisions about which Mesopotamian styles and technologies to adopt and which to reject.
The first four centuries of the second millennium b.c., the Middle Bronze Age, supply a particularly compelling illustration of the complexities of the Syrian— Mesopotamian relationship. In one sense, this period offers an example to contradict the core-and-periphery model, as Jean-Marie Durand has elucidated.7 Syria and Mesopotamia were linked culturally, economically, politically, and ethnically, without an obvious advantage of one side over the other. The Syro-Mesopotamian world had become a "global village," an oikoumene, in which relatively equivalent political forces alternately struggled and cooperated with one another. And yet a closer look at the evidence reveals that Mesopotamia's traditional cultural preeminence had not been totally eclipsed. In this brief essay, I
2
will explore some of the ways in which this world order manifested itself and some of the issues involved in understanding it.
The Amorite Takeover Central to the developments of the Middle Bronze Age in Syria and Mesopotamia was the group known as the Amorites. Martu in Sumerian, amurru in Akkadian, the term "Amorite" refers to people who originated in Syria but were also living in large numbers in southern Mesopotamia by the late third millennium b.c.8 Given their kinship ties and common West Semitic language, it is reasonable to understand Amorite as an ethnic term, although other interpretations have been advanced.9
While a significant number of Amorites were pastoral nomads tending herds of sheep and goats, others were sedentists practicing agriculture or other economic pursuits, or some combination of the above. Whether pastoralist or sedentist, the Amorites were organized according to kin affiliations, in groups that have been termed "tribes," "sub-tribes," and "tribal confederacies," social structures that were foreign to Mesopotamia up to this point but may have been more common in Syria.10 Tribal organization is typical of pastoralist groups worldwide, and so its prevalence among the Amorites might be linked to the frequency of pastoralist life-ways amongst them. Since tribal organization was integrated into the states of the period, Lauren Ristvet characterizes these polities as "tribal states," with their own peculiar characteristics and trajectories.11
In a reversal of the usual movement of ideas, technologies, and people from Mesopotamia to Syria, Amorites from Syria migrated in large numbers into southern Mesopotamia in the late third millennium b.c. The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ut {2112-2004 b-c) were troubled by the influx of Amorites into their domain, considering them dangerous and labeling them uncivilized barbarians.12 As is the case with present-day illegal immigrants in the United States, the Amorites were seen as an external threat, yet at the
same time they occupied diverse roles within Mesopotamian society. Also as in the case of present-day "illegals," the authorities built a long wall in an attempt to keep them out. The construction was designated an "Amorite wall" and entitled Muriq-tidnim, "it keeps Tidnum at a distance," Tidnum being one of the most important Amorite groups.13 The wall, apparently, was ineffectual.
By about 2000 b.c. (Middle Chronology), the Third Dynasty of Ur had collapsed under the weight of external pressures and internal weaknesses. In its wake, a number of individual city-states appeared. Remarkably, almost all of them had Amorites at their head: the "illegals" had come out on top. It is clear that the new rulers' Amorite identity was important to them. In addition to adopting traditional Mesopotamian titles, many called themselves rabian amurrim, "prince of the Amorites." Others assumed titles referring to their membership in Amorite subgroups: the ruler of Kisurra was styled rabianum of the Rabbaeans, and Sin-kashid of Uruk was designated ruler of the Amnanum.14 The most famous Amorite monarch, Hammurabi, sometimes referred to himself as "king of all the Amorite land" (lugal da-ga-an kurmar-du), while Kudur-mabuk of Larsa was designated "father of the Amorites."15 According to Piotr Micha-lowski, these rulers' legitimacy was partly based on their claims of high-born lineage within the Amorite kinship units.16 In Syria, the Amorite homeland, Amorites presided over new political entities; foremost among these were Mari, Yamhad, and Qatna.
We do not yet fully understand why Amorites moved in large numbers into southern Mesopotamia. Scholars hypothesize that environmental or sociopolitical crises in Syrian urban societies impelled local peasants and pastoralists to seek out economic opportunities or better pastureland in Mesopotamia; but data supporting such hypotheses are not as substantial as one would hope.17 Similarly, we are largely ignorant as to why Amorites were able to take charge of the majority of cities and states in early second
millennium b.c. Syria and Mesopotamia. One might cite the military advantage that pastoralist groups, given their mobility, can have over sedentists, or it is possible that Amorite mercenaries took advantage of systemic weaknesses and assumed power over the cities they had been hired to defend.18 Norman Yoffee has proposed that the kinship ties between groups of Amorites operating in diverse locations allowed them to cooperate and mobilize effectively.'9 All of these factors may well have been significant. In any case, it should be noted that the Amorites were neither the first nor the last outsider group to acquire political hegemony in Mesopotamia; in the later third millennium b.c. the Gutian dynasty assumed power, as did the Kassites and Aramaeans in later periods. The reasons for the success of these groups likewise remain to be fully elucidated.
Third millennium b.c. Syrian textual sources from Ebla, Tell Beydar, and Mari say very little about Martu or the Amorites, despite their presumed origins in Syria. It is not clear whether they were localized in a relatively small region of western Syria or occupied a broader expanse.20 Encouraging new results from archaeological survey and excavation in the steppe east of Raqqa and in the Jebel Bishri region, the supposed homeland of the Amorites, allow for the identification of architectural and mortuary features possibly associated with pastoralists and tribally organized groups, but the identification of the groups as Amorites is as yet conjectural.21
A Syro-Mesopotamian Oikoumene The acquisition of political power over both Syria and Mesopotamia by members of the same ethnic group had significant ramifications. For the first time, rulers throughout Syria and Mesopotamia shared ties of kinship. As is well known, the ancestors claimed by the Amorite kings of Babylon, extending back to kings "who lived in tents," were the same as those cited by the Upper Mesopotamian Amorite conqueror Shamshi-Adad 22 In this world dominated
by Amorites, neither Mesopotamia nor Syria appears to have been privileged as a political superior. In the words of the well-known letter written by Itur-Asdu to his master, king Zimri-Lim of Mari: "There is no king who is strong on his own: ten to fifteen kings follow Hammurabi of Babylon, Rim-Sin of Larsa the same, Ibal-pi-El of Eshnunna the same, Amut-pi-El of Qatna the same, and 20 kings follow Yarim-Lim of Yamhad."23 If any of these rulers was accorded an advantage, it was Yarim-Lim, based in northern Syria, who had the largest following of kings.
As the documents from Mari reveal, the Amorite kings of Syria and Mesopotamia were in continual contact, sending emissaries from court to court to ascertain the intentions and actions of each ruler and to make deals.24 The kings themselves not infrequently traveled long distances to visit one another.25 Alliances were concluded between such polities as Yamhad and Babylon, and Mari and Eshnunna, only to be revoked shortly thereafter. Dynastic marriages also took place, as between Zimri-Lim and Shiptu, daughter of the king of Yamhad, and between Shamshi-Adad s son Yasmah-Addu and the daughter of the king of Qatna.26
Trade flowed freely throughout the Amorite oikoumene and beyond, usually without a distinct advantage to either Syria or Mesopotamia. The Old Assyrian merchants' routes to central Anatolia traversed the Syrian Jezireh without impediment. Evidence of a Babylonian trading network crossing Syria and reaching into southeastern Anatolia lias also materialized. In 2007, the Italian-Turkish joint excavations at Tilmen Hoyiik, north of Aleppo in the Islahiye Plain of southeastern Turkey, found a door sealing with the inscription of the scribe Lagamal-gamil, servant of Sumu-la-el, king of Babylon, a predecessor of Hammurabi. The sealing indicates that a Babylonian performed administrative tasks at this site far from his homeland. The excavator, Nicolo Marchetti, posits that the sealing provides evidence of a commercial
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Cultures in Contact
Fig. la, b. Diorite fragment of a victory stele showing (a) the king smiting his enemy and (b) a (royal?) captive. Mesopotamia. Old Assyrian period, reign of Shamshi-Adad I (?), ca. 1808-177« Musee du Louvre, Paris AO 2776
network, operating from Babylon and Sippar through Syria and into Anatolia, with the aim of acquiring Anatolian raw materials.27 That it was the Mesopotamians and not the Syrians who initiated such trading systems is not surprising, given the scarcity or absence of metals, wood, and precious stone in Mesopotamia and its significant distance from sources of such materials.
The mobility of Amorite pastoral nomadic groups crossing territories in both Syria and Mesopotamia also contributed to the interrelated world of the two regions. As Durand, Dominique Charpin, and their team of Mari specialists have observed, there is a curious phenomenon of "mirror toponymy," in which the same geographical name
morite Global Village: Syrian-Mesopotamian Relations in the Second Millennium b.c.
Fig. 2. Drawing of victory stele found in a field near Tell Asmar. Old Babylonian period, reign of Dadusha, ca. 1780 b.c. Iraq Museum, Baghdad IM 95200
was often applied to disparate localities, perhaps indicating the end points of pastoralist migratory routes or other nodes of mobility28 For example, Yamutbal was simultaneously the name of a group located near the Jebel Sinjar in northern Mesopotamia, and a region (rendered "Emutbal") near Larsa, in southern Mesopotamia.
War and Its Repercussions Although political cooperation and economic exchange were typical of Syro-Mesopotamian relations in the Amorite period, persistent and ubiquitous warfare was an equally important aspect of interregional contact. The rulers of the region may have shared kinship and ethnic identities, but this did not prevent them from engaging in constant hostilities. The excellent syntheses presented by Charpin and Nele Ziegler provide a numbingly monotonous tale of military activities undertaken by the rulers of the Syrian and Mesopotamian kingdoms against one another.29 Reviewing the career of Shamshi-Adad in the late nineteenth-early eighteenth century b.c., for example, we find that after forming his Upper Mesopotamian kingdom through numerous military adventures, he conducted hostilities against Eshnunna, assisted Qatna in western Syria against rebellions, joined Eshnunna and Babylon against cities in southern Mesopotamia, and dealt with numerous rebellions against his own authority. A stele usually attributed to Shamshi-Adad and commemorating a campaign against the town of Qabra, near Erbil, in northern Mesopotamia, provides a rare artistic representation of such military activity (fig. ia, b).30 Another stele memorializing the same event was set up by Shamshi-Adad's ally Dadusha of Eshnunna and was found by archaeologists near Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna) (fig. 2).31
After Shamshi-Adad's death around 1776 b.c., his empire quickly disintegrated. His enemy Zimri-Lim took over Mari and much of Upper Mesopotamia, and Zimri-Lim's reign, too, was marked by numerous
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Cultures in Contact
military campaigns, including another confrontation with Eshnunna, an invasion by the Elamites, and an expedition to western Syria to help Yamhad put down a rebellion. One of Zimri-Lim's main allies was Hammurabi of Babylon; in one document, Hammurabi affirms that "the city of Mari and Babylon have always been one house and one finger that does not lend itself to be split."32 Only a few years later, however, Hammurabi's armies destroyed Mari, ending its status as an urban center and regional power. The other major central Mesopota-mian power, Eshnunna, likewise met its fate at the hands of Hammurabi's forces.33
Why the constant warfare? Obviously the various hegemons of the Amorite sphere sought both to increase their power and wealth and to protect themselves against similarly predatory peers and superiors. But ideological factors were probably of great importance as well, including the high value attached to the military lifestyle and the need for elites to demonstrate their military prowess in order to legitimize their authority. The victory stele of Dadusha of Eshnunna, for example, avers that the king's motivation in mounting military campaigns was to acquire prestige with other rulers: "In the land of Subartu, I defeated the territory between the lands of Burunda and Eluhtum and the lands/mountains of Diluba and Lullum with my mighty weapons. So that the kings in all the land and forever will sing my praises, I did this."34
A state of persistent warfare was not unique to early second millennium b.c. Syro-Mesopotamia. During the Third Dynasty of Ur, for example, Steven J. Garfinkle reports, a similarly continuous military activity obtained, though it was usually conducted on the peripheries of Mesopotamia or beyond.35 Garfinkle's theory that these campaigns supported a prestige economy by furnishing the elite with a constant supply of precious goods does not explain the conduct of Middle Bronze Age belligerents, who primarily '""glit in the lowlands of Mesopotamia
rather than in the resource-rich highlands. In the twenty-fourth century b.c., the Ebla texts were already depicting an environment of persistent conflicts between the rulers of Syria and northern Mesopotamia, with wars, shifting alliances, and tenuous diplomacy that recall the situation in the Amorite period.36
When sources report on the incessant warfare that the early second millennium b.c. rulers engaged in, they pay little attention to the individuals who conducted most of this activity and suffered accordingly: the soldiers. One may well sympathize with the prisoners of war depicted on royal monuments like the stele of Dadusha (fig. 2). Victorious kings made a point of abusing and killing captives as enemies and rebels against proper authority, or at best enslaved them, but it was the rulers who made the decisions that precipitated the doom of the common soldiers, who could only obey and hope for the best. How the rulers managed to raise the troops needed to conduct the nonstop warfare, and why the troops agreed to participate, are interesting but difficult questions.37 An ilkum system was sometimes employed, in which soldiers were allotted land in return for joining the army.38 Amorite pastoralists were a major source of soldiers, and mercenaries were sometimes used. Presumably a glorification of the warrior's lifestyle also played an important role, as would the prospect of booty. Finally, and not least, rulers used coercion. A Mari official wrote to Zimri-Lim about his strategy for raising troops: "If they still do not assemble three days from now, with my lord's permission, I will kill a criminal who is in prison, cut his head off and parade it from village to village . . . , so that the people become afraid and assemble soon."39
It would be useful to inquire as to the effect such continual warfare had on the political, economic, and environmental conditions of the Syro-Mesopotamian region. It is evident, in fact, that after a period of intensive warfare in the era of Shamshi-Adad, Zimri-Lim, and
An Amorite Global Village: Syrian-Mesopotamian Relations in the Second Millennium b.c.
Hammurabi, the landscape of the Syrian Jezireh and Upper Mesopotamia had changed. The major urban centers of Tut-tul (Tell Bi'a) and Mari were both largely defunct by the end of Hammurabi's reign and were not replaced by similar prosperous urban centers. Terqa (Tell 'Ashara), the capital of Mari's successor state, Hana, was nowhere near the great metropolis that Mari had been, and no urban center is evident in the Upper Khabur, the site of formerly great cities such as Shubat-Enlil (Tell Leilan) and Nagar (Tell Brak). It is likely that the constant internecine warfare ultimately led to dire economic, demographic, and environmental consequences. The effect of frequent warfare could include the loss of manpower, mass deportations,40 the devastation of agriculture, and even plagues of locusts, as Karen Radner has recently discussed, since human labor was required to keep the Moroccan locust population in this region in check.41 Walther Sallaberger has suggested that the unprecedented scale of warfare in the late third millennium b.c. Syrian Jezireh led to urban disintegration and decentralization,42 and I would suggest that similar factors applied in the later Amorite period. Given Robert McC. Adams's survey results in the Diyala and
other parts of southern Mesopotamia, the same conclusion might be drawn for the Eshnunna region and parts of Sumer as well. Excavation in the Diyala demonstrates that the primary cities of Eshnunna and Tutub (Khafaje), as well as smaller sites like Tell Harmal and Tell Agrab, were abandoned in the Old Babylonian period,43 while survey data indicate that most larger sites in the region and numerous smaller ones were deserted at that time.44 Adams estimates a decline of one-third to one-half of the total sedentary population. A similar pattern of deurbanization and diminution of the sedentary population is observable in Sumer.45 While failed agricultural policies, shifting watercourse patterns, and climate changes can also be invoked to account for such changes, the effects of continual warfare should be factored into the situation.
Mesopotamia as Model Although the Amorite period provides a rare instance in which there was no obvious political or economic dominance by southern Mesopotamia, a review of our evidence shows that southern Mesopotamian culture still served as a prestigious model and referent for Syrian polities. The Amorites spoke their own West Semitic language, evinced
Fig. 3. Stone cylinder seal with modern impression. Umm el-Marra. Middle Bronze Age. National Museum, Aleppo UMM08 Gi
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Cultures in Contact
in their personal names, but the cuneiform records of the Amorite rulers were always written in Akkadian, the Semitic language traditionally used for writing in Mesopotamia. Not only was Akkadian the preferred written language, but the scribes at Mari abruptly switched to writing in the Old Babylonian dialect during the reign of Yahdun-Lim in the late nineteenth century b.c., directly imitating the most up-to-date scribal conventions of the south.46
Slightly later, in the early eighteenth century b.c., Shamshi-Adad established an unusually extensive kingdom in northern Mesopotamia and the Syrian Jezireh. One of the salient characteristics of this kingdom was the emulation of southern Mesopota-mian cultural attributes. When Shamshi-Adad established his capital at the city of Shekhna, modern Tell Leilan in the Upper Khabur plains, he renamed it Shubat-Enlil, honoring the Mesopotamian god Enlil, who legitimizes kingship. At Shubat-Enlil, Shamshi-Adad built a temple whose elaborate, semiengaged spiral columns are directly comparable to examples from Larsa in southern Mesopotamia.47 He also employed titles ordinarily associated with southern Mesopotamian rulers, such as "king of Akkad," and sar kissatim, "king of the world."48 While Durand has suggested that the Mesopotamian orientation of Shamshi-Adad might be linked to that ruler's origins in Akkad itself, I would suggest that we consider instead Shamshi-Adad's ambitions to be seen as the founder of a multiregional state or empire.49 The most obvious model available was that of the Sargonic dynasty of third millennium b.c. Mesopotamia, which had established the first Near Eastern state with a universalist ideology and multi-regional dominion. Shamshi-Adad presented himself as the heir to the well-known Sargonic imperial tradition.
A Mesopotamianization of elite material culture in Syria can also be seen in the glyptic realm. Syrian cylinder seals, used for documenting property and transactions, had long emulated Mesopotamian artistic
models.50 But the glyptic from Shamshi-Adad's capital and other Syrian power centers displayed an even more pronounced debt to Babylonian glyptic art.51 For example, the representation of the king holding a mace and facing a suppliant goddess, a common motif in the court styles of the major Syrian polities, originated in Babylonia.52 At the same time, local motifs and styles were integrated with the Babylonian iconography. In the case of a Classic Syrian style53 cylinder seal excavated in 2008 by the joint Johns Hopkins University-University of Amsterdam expedition to Umm el-Marra in western Syria (fig. 3), the seated god has Mesopotamian attributes—a horned crown, a vase of flowing water, and a flounced robe—but the style in which these elements are depicted differs from Mesopotamian examples.54 The individual horns of the crown are not as clearly separated as they are in Mesopotamia, and the flounces of the robe are enclosed within the outlines of the garment as opposed to the separate rows of flounces forming a jagged outline to the garment on Mesopotamian seals. Further, the standing man and the animals are purely Syrian motifs.55
One can observe the influence of southern Mesopotamian material culture in the nonelite realm as well. Two common pottery types of the Middle Bronze II period in Syria (ca. 1800—1600 b.c.) appear first in southern Mesopotamia and thus seem to have been copied by the Syrian potters from Mesopotamian models.56 The first of these is the cylindrical beaker with low carina-tion, which Max Mallowan referred to as a "grain measure," like those seen in Isin-Larsa levels at Tell Asmar and Khafaje.57 Similarly, the so-called shoulder cup, a cari-nated small jar with a tall neck and small button or pedestal base, appears to have originated in southern Mesopotamia.58
It appears to be much easier to discern Syrian emulation of Mesopotamian material culture than the reverse—Syrian artistic motifs, writing styles, and other cultural elements are only rarely evident in southern
An Amorite Global Village: Syrian—Mesopotamian Relations in the Second Millennium b.c.
Mesopotamia.59 We may conclude, therefore, that the traditional view of Mesopotamia as a cultural forebear and source of prestigious styles was still potent even in this period of shared ethnicity throughout Syria and Mesopotamia. But this situation changed gradually as the Middle Bronze Age continued, and Mesopotamian cultural influence in Syria began to dissipate after the fall of Mari and the diminution of Babylon's power. The art of Yamhad in the later Middle Bronze Age, for example, has fewer Mesopotamian elements and shows more borrowings from Egypt and the Aegean.60
Conclusions
The Amorite domination in Syria and Mesopotamia drew to a close by 1600 b.c., when the Hittite kings Hattusili I and Mursili I destroyed Yamhad in Syria and the Babylonian kingdom governed by Hammurabi's heirs. In the Late Bronze period that followed, the ethnic and political makeup of the region changed dramatically. A dynasty of Kassites, probably from western Iran, assumed control in Babylonia. In Syria and northern Mesopotamia, the kingdom of Mitanni ruled over a population whose personal names and, apparently, spoken language were Hurrian, from the eastern Anatolian highlands. The shared ethnicity of the Amorite period was over, as was the era of numerous competing polities bickering and coexisting with one another. Instead, there were only two major political entities: Kassite Babylonia in the south and Hurrian Mitanni in the north. While Mesopotamian cultural influence might still be seen in the glyptic art of Mitanni, the intense interrelations characteristic of the Amorite period no longer applied. Syria became more and more connected economically, politically, and culturally to the Aegean, Egypt, and Anatolia. Mesopotamia, the ancient core and dominant cultural model, had become just one of many points of contact and sources of inspiration.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Joan Aruz for inviting me to participate in the "Beyond Babylon" symposium, to the members of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for their assistance and col-legiality, and to Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. R. A. Carter and Philip 2010. Note, however, that several essays in this volume question the Mesopotamian origins of Ubaid materia] culture styles.
2. Algaze 1993; G. Stein 1999.
3. Sallaberger 2007.
4. Potts 1997.
5. Schwartz 2001, pp. 256-61; Van De Mieroop 2007b, pp. 38-39.
6. G. Stein 2002.
7. Durand 1992.
8. Streck 2000.
9. Kamp and Yoffee 1980; Sallaberger 2007; Porter 2012.
to. Fleming 2004, pp. 24—33; Porter 2012,
11. Ristvet 2012.
12. Jahn 2007.
13. Frayne 1997, p. 290; Marches! 2006
14. Charpin 2004, pp. 74, 96—97, 108; Jahn 2007.
15. Frayne 1990, pp. 206, 343-46.
16. P. Michalowski 1983, pp. 240—41.
17. Weiss et al. 1993; Sallaberger 2007.
18. Whiting 1995.
[9. Yoffee 1995, p. 297.
20. Archi 1985; Fleming 2004, p. 40. On the problems of recognizing Amorites in the Syrian archaeological record, see L. Cooper 2006, pp. 248—50; Nichols and Weber 2006. In Syria, the inception of Middle Bronze Age urban society can be studied with reference to the regeneration of societal complexity after a period of decentralization and collapse (Schwartz 2006).
21. Fujii and Adachi 2010; Lonnqvist 2010; Meyer 2010; Nishiaki 2010; Numoto and Kume 2010.
22. Finkelstein 1966.
23. Dossin 1938, pp. 117-18.
24. Durand 1997—2000; Heimpel 2003.
25. Villard 1986.
26. No obvious cases of dynastic marriages between ruling families in the north (Syria, the Jezireh) and southern Mesopotamia are evident, however. It is notable that the Amorite rulers' diplomatic
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contacts were largely restricted to the region dominated by the Amorites in Syria and Mesopotamia. Podany 2010, p. 14.
27. Marchetti 2009; Marchetti 2010 On the Sippar-Anatolia network, see Marchetti 2003, p. 166,
n. 20.
28. Durand 1992.
29. Charpin and Zieglcr 2003; Charpin 2004 See also the recently published archives from Tell Leilan, offering a similar chronicle of unrelenting military activity (Eidem 2011),
30. Andre-Salvini in Beyond Babylon, pp. 25—26, no. 5.
31. Ismail and Cavigneaux 2003.
32. Heimpel 2003, pp. 372-73.
33. On the collapse of IVlari and Eshnunna, see Fazal 2007, which discusses the tendency for states caught between two powerful rivals (in this case, Babylon and Yamhad) to perish.
34. Bahrani 2008, pp. 140—41. 35  Garfinkle forthcoming.
36. Archi and Biga 2003; Biga 2008.
37. For complaints about a soldier's lot, see, e.g., Veenhof and Eidem 2008, p. 332, where north Mesopotamian troops lament a lack of food and clothing. On desertion, see Heimpel 2003, p. 486. Hamblin (2006, pp. 192-93, 208—9) discusses these issues as well.
38. Charpin 2004, pp. 279-80.
39. Van De Mieroop 2005b, p. 22.
40. Durand 1992, pp. 102-5.
41. Radner 2004; see also Heimpel 2003, pp. 420—21.
42. Sallaberger 2007.
43. Ishchali is an exception to this pattern (Hill, Jacobsen, and Delougaz 1990).
44. Adams 1965, pp. 50-53. The trend of decline in sedentary occupation from the Isin-Larsa period to Old Babylonian times may also apply to the Ham-rin region (Gibson 1981, p. 22), although some later Old Babylonian occupation has been discerned at the archaeological sites of Tell Yelkhi and Tell
edh-Dhiba'i (Gasche et al. 1998, pp. 18-20). [ am grateful to McGuire Gibson and James Armstrong for their comments on the Old Babylonian period in the Hamrin.
45. Adams 1981, pp. 138-53.
46. Durand 1992, pp. 121—23. For discussion of the "Akkadianization" of writing and of the material culture at Mari in the Amorite period, see also Charpin and Ziegler 2003, p. 40, nn. 99, 100; Butterlin 2007, pp. 242—43.
47- Weiss 1985. One might also point out occasional commonalities in palace architecture in Syria and Mesopotamia in this period, such as the sequence of throne room, adjacent "banqueting room," and sometimes an additional adjacent court, observable at Qatna, Tuttul (Tell Bi'a), Mari, Eshnunna, and Larsa (Blocher 2009, p. 259).
48. Grayson 1987, pp. 47-66.
49. Durand 1997-2000, vol. 2, pp. 108—9.
50. Porada 1985.
51. Parayre 1990; Otto 2000.
52. Otto 1992.
53. Otto 2000, Group 2a. This seal, UMM08 Gi, derives from room debris in the third of five Middle Bronze Age phases (from earliest to latest) in trench 1006/4012 in Northwest Area A. The seal is currently housed in the Aleppo Museum.
54. Since the water-god motif originates in southern Mesopotamia in the Akkadian period but is absent from early second millennium B.C. Babylonia, Otto (2000, pp. 220—21) proposes that its continued or revived use in Middle Bronze Age Syria was part of an "Akkadian renaissance."
55. I am extremely indebted to Sally Dunham for her comments and assistance on this seal.
56. D. L. Stein 1984, p. 12.
57. Mallowan 1946, p. 148. For an illustration, see Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, p. 332, fig. 10.3O.
58. For illustrations, see Akkermans and Schwartz 2003, p. 293, fig. 9.3C, G.
59. Marchetti 2003.
60. Collon 1975.
An Amorite Global Village: Syrian-Mesopotamian Relations in the Second Millennium b.c.