Late Hittite Emar: The Chronology, Synchronisms, And Socio-Political Aspects of a Late Bronze Age Fortress Town (Book Review‪)‬

Late Hittite Emar: The Chronology, Synchronisms, and Socio-Political Aspects of a Late Bronze Age Fortress Town. By MURRAY ADAMTHWAITE. Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Supplement 8. Louvain: PEETERS, 2001. Pp. xxiii + 293, illus. [euro]70 (paper). In this well-illustrated volume, Murray Adamthwaite has made important contributions to study of the cuneiform tablets from Late Bronze Age Emar. Emar was excavated during the mid-1970s by Jean-Claude Margueron, and its several hundred tablets were published capably by Daniel Arnaud in 1985-87. Since the excavations, various collections of tablets acquired on the antiquities market have proved to include large numbers of Emar texts. Some of them were demonstrably taken from the same building that yielded the majority of excavated tablets, the building [M.sub.1], the home of an overseer of much local Emar religious life, a man who took the title "diviner of the gods of Emar." The excavated tablets came from layers that were roughly contemporary with the heyday of excavated Ugarit in the thirteenth century B.C., when all of northern Syria had been taken over by the Hittite empire and was ruled from Carchemish. Adamthwaite gathers many strands of the Emar evidence that illuminate the town's place under Hittite rule. The effort is worthwhile but uneven, and flawed by what I believe is a misreading of Emar chronology.