The Syrian Fertile Crescent, Cradle of Civilizations...

The Fascinating Kingdom of Mari

2005-07-29T04:38:00.000-07:00

In the heart of the Syrian Desert, just off the western flank of the Middle Euphrates about twelve kilometers from the Iraqi border, stands one of the most important, yet least known, of the archaeological sites in Mesopotamia.

And while modern access, on a paved highway from nearby Deir Ezzor, is well populated by desert villages and grazing flocks, Mari, or Tel Hariri, early in the twentieth century was remote and virtually inaccessible, so was discovered, as often happens in archaeology, by pure chance.

It would seem that in the heat of May, in1933, a French officer on his way through Syria was stopped by a young shepherd in the desert, who said he needed an informed opinion. The officer, exhausted And while modern access, on a paved highway from nearby Deir Ezzor, is well populated by desert villages and grazing flocks, Mari, or Tel Hariri, early in the twentieth century was remote and virtually inaccessible, so was discovered, as often happens in archaeology, by pure chance. from the long journey, was only too glad to dismount, to rest and water his horse.

The young man, however, insisted that the officer look at his find. He had just stumbled across an unusual statue, carved of the local crystallized gypsum, as he turned over the more ordinary stones with which to cover a grave.

The statue appeared to be old, said the young man, and the officer noticed that despite the absence of a head, it was very beautiful. His curiosity aroused, the officer notified the authorities in the Department of Antiquities and Archaeology in Deir Ezzor, then as now the provincial capital of Syria's northeastern Jezira province, in the Khabur-Euphrates watershed.

A commission was immediately dispatched to the site, an evidently manmade hill, in effect a "tel" -archaeological remains on elevated topography-- in the desert; and with only a minimum of effort further artifacts came to light. Sections of mud-brick wall, more gypsum statues in ceremonial dress, votive offerings, as well as an inscription that identified one figure in particular as a representation of King Lamgi Mari, thus confirming that the disorderly stones and fragments of construction, now strewn across Tel Hariri, were in fact bits and pieces that might provide a clue to the legendary Mesopotamian stronghold of Mari, whose whereabouts, despite its importance and unique circumstances, had for decades confounded both archaeologists and historians.

It would seem that Mari, perhaps by 2900 B.C., had grown from a village to a more ambitious settlement, surely because of its strategic location, thus offered the possibilities for the construction of a new city. The site, in effect, came to control the trade lanes between western Iran and central and southern Mesopotamia, with Karkemish and the fertile Syrian steppes to the north in Anatolia - now part of Turkey-and throughout the Khabur-Euphrates river system. The embankments farther to the south offered additional protection for the caravans bringing their goods to the merchants of Tadmor (later Palmyra), Halab (Aleppo), Qatna, the Emesa (Homs)-Tripoli gap on to Byblos in the west and Damascus to the southwest. By the Bronze Age this cargo had grown from dried fruits and dates, olives and their oil, pottery and porcelain, textiles and grains to include the tin so indispensable for bronze casting, brought overland from India and Malaya, two of the few places in the world where tin naturally occurs, so the city, as a protection against bandits, random nomads and rival tradesmen, had to be fortified, and with this gave rise to the military sector that would forever after form a part of its society.

By this time Mari had become as well a center of art and culture, which extended to the demands of an assortment of cults and temples. And with this came a parallel political power, since the city, now stable and firmly established, was the core of the dominant hegemony in the Middle Euphrates, controlling trade all the way down to Balikh, on the Persian Gulf. To a degree this dominion was owed to the efficient administration of a vast and effective irrigation system, with a network of canals that not only guaranteed the best use of farmland and permanent pasturage for the camel trains and flocks of goats and sheep, but also the transport by water of trade goods.

At the time Mari was discovered Syria was under French mandate. This permitted the assigning of the project to the already celebrated André Parrot, a seasoned archaeologist experienced in Mesopotamian architecture, who managed to direct the exhaustive excavations until 1974. During those years Mari's secrets, though still obscure, and often in counter position to the fieldwork and research of other teams operating in the area, little by little came to light. A Syrian people, it appears, had adopted the Sumerian culture, but recreated it according to their own dictates, with a peculiar grace, subtlety, and completely personal artistic vision. Samples of this style are on exhibit in the National Museum in Damascus, the National Museum in Aleppo, the exceptional archaeological museum in Deir Ezzor, as well as the Louvre in Paris. After 1978 work came under the direction of French anthropologist Jean-Claude Margueron.

Mari's impact on the history of Mesopotamia probably began with the construction of the first palace complex, between c. 2700 and 2600 B.C., with its thick adobe walls, cisterns and possibly the first temple, later, in subsequent construction phases, consecrated to Ishtar.

The Great Temple of Dagan, deity of storms and the heavens, was then added as part of the palace complex and by around 2500 B.C. had become the nucleus of a cult that attracted not only local worshipers but also pilgrims from the surrounding countryside, up and down the river. The kings of Akkad (Northern Mesopotamia) attributed their success to Dagan, so fashioned great bronze lions to represent them at the temple doorway; and by the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur his cult had become the official state religion. He was the principal deity in Ebla, in western Syria, by 2300 B.C. and his cult was carried to Ougarit, on the Mediterranean coast, by around 1300 B.C. There he was venerated as the father of Baal, the second most important deity after the Supreme God "El". In time Dagan, especially the Philistines, ancestors of the Palestinians, also venerated himself, as a principal deity.

Mari saw another period of ascendancy between c. 2340 and 2150 B.C., during the reign of Sargon II of Akkad, when the king used the city as the base for his campaign of expansion. His domination was short-lived, but he left as a legacy the cult of Shamash, the remains of whose temple were uncovered near the "Maison Rouge", a knoll of rust-red earth adjacent to the current palace excavations, possibly the location of the original temple-pyramid -the ziggurat-that according to legend existed in Mari before the period of palace architecture.

Shamash is an Akkadian word meaning "Sun", transliterated by the Assyrians and Babylonians as the Sun God. His temple in Mari possibly predates Sargon himself, given the analogy with the sun goddess Shamash in Ougarit. The inference is that Shamash was initially a female deity, then was later presented as male through association with the solar deity Utu of Sumeria, implicitly an emblem of authority and consistent, by then, with the dictates of conquest, expansion and domination of neighboring peoples.

Shamash was believed to know everything, see everything, understand everything, and in addition he accompanied travelers on their journeys, to keep them safe from harm or evil. The cylinder seals of the time show him standing in a great portal between two huge doors which are wide open, though guarded by gatekeepers. These doors are presumably to be found between the twin peaks of Mount Mashu, and according to the legend of Gilgamesh are the Eastern Doors to Heaven.

Shamash's attribute is a saw. With it he can prune a tree as easily as split open a mountain. Metaphorically, his saw dispels intransigence and irrelevance, thus permitting sensible decisions, and with this he is interpreted as a God of Wisdom and Justice. He punishes wrongdoers, bestows happiness on "those deserving of it" and controls the seasons of the year. His cult in Mari, according to evidence unearthed in Ghuzana (Tel Halaf), Ebla (Tel Mardikh), and others of the area's many sites, gave the city great importance.

By around 2000 B.C. the population suddenly swelled as a result of the arrival in Mari of a confederation of tribes called the Amorites -perhaps from the Indus Valley-on their way west. Their name, in effect, in the local dialect meant "west". About 1900 B.C. those of their population already settled in nearby Tel Ashara (Terqa), about sixty kilometers to the north, managed to definitively subdue Mari, thus establishing a relatively stable hegemony with ironclad control over the trade in copper and tin that passed through Persia and over the Euphrates, some one hundred and fifty years before the legendary palace-builder Zimri-Lim -also Amorite but from another tribe-ascended the throne. As it happened, before being invested with the command of Mari, Zimri-Lim was shrewd enough to have taken refuge in Aleppo, and only returned to Mari on the occasion of the death of his rival, the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I.

The Amorites, among others of their settlements, ultimately established a colony on the Mediterranean coast. They had finally arrived as far west as they could go. The site was centered around a mysterious cult in Amrit, with its temple -a design allusion, in fact, to the island temple in Amritsar in the Punjab from whence a number of their clans might once have emanated-and, according to the evidence and artifacts in the archaeological museum in Tartus (Tortosa), eventually incorporated Phoenicians from the offshore settlement at the island of Arwad.

Mari thus attested to a parade of migrations, among them Bedouins seeking agricultural or pasture land, armies in search of booty, and merchant caravans in search of markets.

The center of the city came to be defined by its formidable outer walls, and a moat, nearly two kilometers across, fed by the great blue-green Euphrates, that protected the vast complex of palaces and temples, harem, baths, administrative offices, audience halls, banquet halls, storerooms, kitchens and baking ovens, royal apartments, elite residential areas, guest quarters, artisan quarters, the library, archives and study centers. Though construction had actually begun in the Third Millennium it was often modified, by a succession of rulers whose thread has perhaps been lost. Yet the ruins of a temple to the deified king Ninni-Zaza verify an exalted royal lineage. And by the time Zimri-Lim, the last king, ascended the throne the palace had been expanded to include three hundred rooms on two levels covering twenty-five thousand square meters, as well as at least two courtyards open to the sky, their walls as tall as five or six meters, decorated with mural painting that documented the investiture of kings and the taking of slaves, along with a highly refined sculpture, and architectural mannerisms that still defy description so have yet to find their place in the world history of art.

Zimri-Lim's spectacular palace was apparently destroyed, and in fact, according to the descriptions left on the cuneiform tablets of the time, practically leveled, by the Babylonian king Hamurabi, in 1750 B.C. Yet damage was such that the great walls fell in on them, were covered by the desert, and survived, despite the passage of time and the harshness of the climate, until Parrot's arrival in 1933.

According to the archaeologist, the palace represents the oldest and most complete example ever discovered of Mesopotamian architecture. The supports for the second floor somehow managed to survive so with this a number of doorways remained miraculously intact. Remnants of kitchen equipment were found as they had been abandoned, with scraps of cheese or bread still on the floor, and containers for olive oil or water, and clay utensils. Classrooms still revealed signs that the royal children had studied there. An archive concealed sixteen hundred separate tablets describing the king's accounting and finances. The library, probably one of the most complete ever unearthed, contained an astonishing twenty thousand tablets, a record as orderly as it was extensive, for it documents the history and dynasties of a region that stretched from Persia to Palestine.

The mud brick walls were burned a golden brown and many wooden beams, also burned, confirmed the various assaults on the complex, and the attempts to destroy Zimri-Lim's kingdom even before the definitive battle. Even so, bits of mural painting remain, with their geometric motifs combined with pictorial elements such as trees and flowers inside fantastic landscapes with real or imaginary animals, or the narrative that describes the gatherings of deities, ceremonies, sacrifices, the whole set off with decorative elements like the clay medallions whose various designs were determined by molds, also found intact and erroneously termed by a number of sources as molds for bread.

Offerings were found on the altars of the temples, or in the tombs, as elsewhere in Syria: bits of silk, wool or cotton cloth preserved thanks to the dryness of the desert. Statuary, ritual pottery, jewelry, votive offerings, all managed to survive Hamurabi's onslaught. Even the eroded and rounded remains of the pre-Sargon quarter, with its Akkadian ruins, can still be determined.

Excavations in the Temple of Ishtar verify the successive periods of construction. The temple's upper level, which corresponds to that destroyed by Hamurabi, refers to the Third Dynasty of Ur, but beneath it lie the ruins of a pre-Sargonite temple presumably destroyed by Eannadu, King of Lagash, in 2850 B.C. The third temple consisted of a single hall, surrounded by a patio with a portico and six columns. The fourth temple, built before 3000 B.C. and consecrated to a "virile goddess", revealed a number of votive figurines, cylinder seals, and spikes to hold the stone blocks of the foundations in place. Despite the looting of centuries, vandalism and the destruction or mutilation of the sculptures in the name of one or another faith, the temples, especially Ishtar's, represent cults with great religious impact over the widest range and diversity of societies, and the longest period of time. Yet for all its superimposition of cults and structures, after the last, vindictive Babylonian campaign, Mari's splendor finally faded and was never revived.

Though briefly and unsuccessfully occupied by soldiers of fortune from the neighboring kingdom of Khana, with their capital in Terqa (antecedent of the later, Hellenistic city of Doura Europos to the north), Mari was eventually reduced to a village and squalor replaced splendor. There was no more grandeur, no more study or innovation in art or learning. No one was curious enough to scratch around the palace in search of the remains of a glorious past, that archaeology would later uncover, like the bronze lions from the entrance to the Temple of Dagan, crushed under the debris. Idols from the Period of the Princes (Shakkanakku), those governors of a foreign power with their palace on the temple mount, vanished under the fallen walls. The ripe fertility goddesses, the solemn priests in attitudes of piety, the kings, public officials, effigies, in stone, alabaster, gypsum, fresco, like the facts and the dates and the names on all the tablets attributed to the library of the last king, even the posture of the dead in their tombs, had to wait until the mid-twentieth century in order to reveal something of the lives and the customs of the people who inhabited the three hundred rooms, yet their legacy is richly evoked in curious relics.

From the eighteenth century before Christ is the figure identified with the governor Ishtup-Ilum, with his Assyrian beard and Chinese style robes. From the same period is a fertility goddess, later identified with Artemisa and her cult in Ephesus.

Allegorical or mythological is the "eagle with the head of a lion", of lapis lazuli, gold, bitumen and copper, dated around 2500 B.C. It was used as a pendant and was associated with the cult of Anzu, of the Sumerian deity Ningirsu, from the city of Lagash.

There is the girl, dating from the Third Millennium, perhaps a priestess, known as "the songstress", one of Mari's most famous finds. Her typical skirt, or kaunaké, was confected of tufts of goat hair, stylized by the anonymous artist. She sits cross-legged on an enigmatic throne or bench, scored on one side, with scales on the other. Her hands no longer exist but the broken remains indicate she held them, in ritual piety, clutched at her breast. Her elbows, in the typically Sumerian style, are thin and pointed.

Of a related period, c. 2600 to 2350 B.C., is the seated figure of a woman sculpted from crystallized gypsum. She is possibly a representation of Ishtar --in fact, she was found in Ishtar's temple-and she sits enveloped by her burgeoning kaunaké. Her elaborate hairstyle and long shawl, actually a tapestry also confected of tufts of goat hair, are symbolic of her rank. The bench on which she sits is inscribed with royal insignia.

The priestly Ur-Nanshe appeared in many forms, and is to be found in a number of museums. His representations are solemn, imbued with dignity, yet somehow the endearing contours of the body, inside the outrageous kaunaké, the pointed elbows, the strong chin, the enigmatic half-smile, give him an immediacy unlikely in art from so remote a period.

A votive figure from the temple of Ninni-Zaza, c. 2600 to 2350 B.C., with his voluminous kaunaké, long beard, the stylized eyebrows and the black outline around shell-and-jet eyes -curiously similar to the eyes on the moai of Easter Island-- bears an inscription, attributed to Shibum, or Shamagan, King of Mari, praising the personage of the elusive god-king known as Ninni-Zaza, and with it, confirming the grandeur and the majesty of the mysterious Mesopotamian kingdom, now ruined and bare, but that shimmered then from the pinnacle that overlooked its canals, by the winding blue-green river: "He who contemplates a Land-Without-End, governed by the King of the World; it is he who humbly extends this offering to the divine Ninni-Zaza".

The Hallowed Maaloula

2005-06-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

Miracles, martyrdom and a magical setting, of small houses -the roof of one giving access to the terrace of the next-- that rise in layers like a birthday cake of pastel blue, lilac and yellow against the rocky halo of a sheer mountain backdrop, all combine to make a fairy-tale of Maaloula, that unfolds "once upon a time".

Maaloula, in Aramaic, means "entrance". The portal in question refers to a legend involving Saint (Mar) Tekla, whose sanctuary nestles in a damp cave, in one of the cliffs that embrace the town. As the story goes, the weary young girl, around the year 45 A.D., journeyed here from near Antioch where her faith, encouraged in the teachings of the itinerant St. Paul, had saved her from a cruel martyrdom; she was to have been burned alive in the town square. And while her own dear lord God had sent a downpour to douse the flames, she was now disheartened and travel-worn, her way blocked by a mountain. As she kneeled in dismay, God again came to her rescue and, says the tale, split the mountain, opening a passageway in the cleft, with a soothing stream at the girl's feet.

Though Maaloula can also be entered along a modern paved road, through an enchanted valley, with orchards of apricots and figs, fields of grapes and stands of poplar, that spread across the pockets in the Kalamun Mountains of the Anti-Lebanon range, more evocative, breathtaking in fact, is the way through the gorge -narrow, stony, uneven, traversed by a stream, the passage often shared with a bearded old man on his donkey - and watched over by caves and passageways in the rocky walls that date from the Cro-Magnon wanderers, who first occupied the site 30,000 years ago, and who used the grottoes, like the saints of the first Christian millennium, for refuge, retreat and tombs. Maaloula, and the neighboring towns of Jaba'din and Naj'a, are the last three Aramaic-speaking strongholds in an area once completely dominated by a language so common it was freely spoken in Assyrian and Persian courts, Babylonian councils, by seamen and shepherds, prophets as they preached and merchants at their trade.

Yet while the Arameans seem to have clarified communication, and in fact employed a written alphabet, they were the disruptive force that contributed to the collapse of one after another of the Near Eastern empires. The general description "Arameans" or "Aramaeans", masks the fact that they are not a unified group, except in terms of their language", yet they persisted as a significant, identifiable political and cultural factor in the history of the region from the ninth century B.C. on, despite their elusive origins and their inexplicable appearance, all across the Fertile Crescent.

Before 1500 B.C. the Arameans had been described as "roving, hostile bands of marauders, sometimes agricultural workers, often simple pastoralists", yet after a lapse of some three hundred years, during which information became vague and scarce, the record attests to their reappearance as settled groups in a wide range of political entities, throughout the region from the Tigris to the Levant. The earliest indisputable evidence for the Arameans dates from the reign of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 B.C.), during which at least fourteen annual policing actions were required against a people called the Ablame-Armaya in the area of the middle and upper Euphrates. The Assyrians, in fact, deported them whenever possible. The Babylonians, without success, built walls to keep them out. In the Levant, already badly affected by the collapse of the imperial superstructures, the small city-states were much more vulnerable, giving the Arameans the opportunity not just of harassing, or raiding, or even settling, but of seizing political control as well. Nonetheless, according to scholars a number of questions about these people remain unanswerable, or the versions collide, and ultimately provide only a limited and distorted picture.

The facts do, however, coincide in the troublesome presence of a people, or a number of peoples, "who sow chaos and unrest wherever they appear", and leave "want, hunger, and famine in their wake". The Aramean states, among themselves, in any case never joined forces. Despite their unhappy reputation, their disassociated hegemonies were inexplicably left in place as long as their loyalties to the predominant authority remained intact, while meantime, according to their own sources, and "in the most innocent fashion", they raised their cattle and sheep and grew their crops, and decorated their royal palaces with exquisite stone carvings, elaborate wooden furniture, and bronze bowls with verbose Aramaic inscriptions.

Though their settlement was piecemeal, often as a result of their own migrations or perhaps Assyrian deportations, or the joining of their ranks by dissatisfied peasants all across the region, their presence spread so quickly and thoroughly that their language, written in their own form of an alphabet, spread with them.

This West idiom engendered, in effect, Arabic and Syriac, and since it preserved more phonemes than the Canaanite or Phoenician alphabets, it provided more variations in suffixes and prefixes, among other linguistic idiosyncrasies, so lent itself to a greater precision of expression. And since it was already evident and commonplace long before the Persian campaign, it was adopted by the new conquerors as the most widely applicable administrative and imperial language, for while the Achaemenid kings used local languages for their decrees, they came to employ Aramaic as a kind of lingua franca, and thus contributed to the further spread of its use throughout the imperial territories. Aramaic, therefore, came to be employed in parallel fashion to local dialects or languages, and predominated in royal and satrapal directives. Evidence confirms its use in Persepolis, Babylonia, Egypt, the Levant and Asia Minor, and even the Parthians used Aramaic script to write their contemporary Middle Iranian languages.

And while the Arameans adopted the deities of the places they occupied they ultimately converted them into their own proper gods, as with Hadad in Aram-Damascus or Be'el Shamen (perhaps equated with El, the supreme deity) throughout the region; yet their rites remain, to this day, a mystery.

With the defeat of the Persians by Alexander in 330 B.C., Greek displaced Aramaic as the official language of the Achaemenid territories. The Romans required the use of Latin. Both Latin and Greek persisted under the Byzantine Empire, but much of this was swept away in the Arab expansion of the seventh century, which carried nearly everything along in its path. So while Byzantium endured until the onslaught of the advancing Ottomans, who by the fourteenth century had overrun most of the Balkan Peninsula as a prelude to the conquest of Constantinople, the lingua franca became, for ordinary- civil, judicial, mercantile-purposes, Arabic, and for the intelligentsia, Persian, considered the language of poetry.

Of the approximately 15,000-18,000 people left in the world today who still speak Aramaic approximately 2000 live in the Syrian Christian town of Maaloula. And while even there the language is on the wane -- victim of satellite television or young people who depart their homes in search of employment in nearby Damascus, some fifty kilometers distant -- the appeal of Aramaic is on the rise among the survivors of the Diasporas in Great Britain or the United States, where it enjoys the mystique of having served as "the language of Christ".

Maaloula might nevertheless have passed into oblivion had it not been for the Edict of Milan of 313 A.D., issued by Constantine the Great, granting Christians the freedom to worship and express their religion according to their personal conviction. The First Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. further regulated the basic elements of Christian worship, thus permitting the building of a church and monastery in the name of Sergius and Sarkis, two soldiers from the army of Roman emperor Maximian, martyred in 297 A.D. because, according to the record, "they refused to worship Rome's pagan gods." Though beatified and buried in Justinian's one-time stronghold at Rasafa (Resafa), in northeastern Syria, now a beautiful ruin abandoned to the desert, the church in Maaloula keeps their memory, and so has won its fame as "the oldest church in the world still in use".

Temple ruins of an earlier cult still survive under the church's foundations, though most of the stone blocks, and the Ionic capitals from the ancient columns, were incorporated in the construction. A semi-circular stone altar at the far end of the sanctuary, the iconostasis, the cool and sober white limestone interior, and walls and gate confected of the wood from Lebanon's precious cedars, all predate the Nicean ruling on the use of platform altars, thus testifying to the structure's antiquity. The most valued and unusual icon in the collection, at least four hundred years old, depicts both the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Though stolen a few years ago, according to Father Tawfiq, overseer of both the church and the monastery from his Holy Savior order in Sidon, in southern Lebanon, the Syrian security police, as well as St. Sergius himself, assured its return.

The Greek Catholic (Melikite) Church has been in full union with Rome since 1724 and recognizes the Pope as its head. With churches as well in Damascus and Aleppo, among other Syrian cities, this singular Christian denomination claims about 300,000 adepts within Syria alone. Yet it was the "once upon a time" cave of Saint Tekla, where she prayed and fasted, preached and baptized, healed the ailing and comforted the forgotten, that became the soul of Maaloula and the heart of its pilgrimage and passion. After passing through the gap in the mountain, living on fresh grasses and water from the stream, the virgin girl -- who had survived her trials in a fire doused by the rain, wild animals tamed by light, a pit of vipers turned away by prayer, and the order to behead her countermanded by the Governor's pity -- was eventually placed in the sepulcher named for "The Mother of the Sick People" (maaloulin in Arabic).

She is still called Brikhta, or "blessed" in Aramaic, "for she bestows her blessings on the pilgrims who visit this grotto, and drink of the water that drips through the walls, and pray at her tomb, even after her death." An enormous grapevine, nourished by the ever-dripping spring, has grown inside the cave. It has covered the entire grotto, until it reaches with its tendrils toward the light, through the mouth of the cave, that faces the terraced town rising along the opposite cliff face. For many, it is the essence of the compassionate young girl, her living memory, her struggle and her consecration.

Saint Tekla was called the "first martyr" because she was the "first Christian woman subject to torture and persecution in the name of Christ" and was considered to be a messenger of the Church, akin to an Apostle, so she was termed "Mar", an Aramaic word applied to those who baptize. With this, Maaloula became an Archbishopric (Archdiocese) in the fourth century and so it continued until the eighteenth century.

The twenty-fourth of September is the Day of Saint Tekla, whose name was given to the Nunnery just below the grotto, sacred to pilgrims of many sects, both Christian and Muslim. A visit here is considered a prior requisite to the trip to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in its day the holiest site in Islam. Under the patronage of the parent institution in Damascus, the nuns devote themselves to prayer and worship but also to attending visitors to the sanctuary, caring for the small on-site historical museum, and preparing the Raising of the Cross, an annual event celebrated each fourteenth of September. The most colorful tradition, however, is the "festival of the fires", still lit on the peak behind the town in commemoration of the mountaintop fires that lighted the way between Jerusalem and Constantinople, "the route of saints, the caves of hermits, the tombs of St. Elias the Zealous, Saint Barbara, Saint Lavenduis, Saint Georgious, Mar Touma."

And so the fairy-tale of Maaloula continues, and "they all lived happily ever after".

The Kingdom of Doura Europos

2005-06-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

In a marriage of the Mediterranean and the Mesopotamian worlds - fusion of the Semitic and the Aryan-- Doura Europos, an indirect legacy of Alexander the Great, was founded around 300 B.C. by order of Seleucos Nicator I, one of Alexander's surviving generals, on the fertile plain between Deir Ezzor and Abu Kemal, in a place now called Salhiye on the right bank of the great blue-green Euphrates.

To Seleucos fell the Asian domains of the empire, and he named his city "Doura" or "Dura" ("Fortress" or "Walled City") "Europos", his home in Macedonia. It was said that the first inhabitants were in effect his boyhood companions, come to the Eastern outpost to colonize, between 313 and 280 B.C., a bulwark against the increasing strength of the Parthians, who would eventually confront the Romans on this spot.

It would be the Roman clash with the Sassanids, however, in the mid-third century A.D., that would end Doura Europos' five long and productive centuries, its seemingly limitless spiritual, artistic and military success, and the aspirations of a Western culture against the might and the mystique of the East. The site would never again be inhabited.

Doura Europos was discovered in March of 1920 by British troops sent out from their base in Iraq to the Middle Euphrates, to put down a desert revolt. The great brick, stone and adobe enclosure around the seventy-five hectares of rolling land, by this time crumbled and bare, nonetheless revealed the remains of scattered construction, that after archaeological examination appeared to be the ruins of the temple of the Aramaic deity, Bel, greatly influential in Palmyra to the west with whom Doura Europos had sustained an intense and fruitful partnership.

In time fifteen different temples, of the separate cults and sects that flourished while the city thrived, would be unearthed and their remains sifted. The excavations of the Academie Francaise des Inscripciones et Belles Lettres proceeded under the direction of Franz Cumont between 1922 and 1924; the project's findings, though sketchy, the product of limited resources, were published in 1926. The most spectacular excavations and the most noteworthy finds -- after ten seasons of six months each, from 1928 to 1937-were effected by the Franco-American mission under the auspices of Yale University, directed by Russian archaeologist M.I. Rostovtzeff. The celebrated Preliminary Reports I to X, and the Final Reports published by the team, revolutionized all previous knowledge of Hellenistic architecture, society and history, in effect the nature and character of a highly original culture -originally Greek but no longer Greek at all -- that evolved after Alexander's death and that continued until the Sassanid advance. A Franco-Syrian mission, directed by archaeologists Leriche and el-Mahmoud, took over the work from 1986 to date. Their camp occupies a slope in the site just to the south of the Euphrates Gate.

It was initially assumed that Seleucos personally selected this location, on a broad promontory protected by two wadis or canyons on either side, that drained into the Euphrates, where the river had eroded an embankment on the third side ranging in height from forty to ninety meters, thus serving as natural defenses. Yet extensive archaeological finds -- of pottery, inscribed tablets and clay vessels -- substantiated prior habitation, dating from the Babylonian period. Agriculturally advanced, with sophisticated systems of irrigation and flood control, and trade routes linking it with Mari in the third and second millennia B.C., the site was known then as Damara. And while it had obviously flourished, and certainly boasted a fortuitous situation, by the time it was colonized by Seleucos' Macedonian adventurers, very little, if anything, remained of the earlier settlement.

The Hellenized Doura Europos, following an example attributed to Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon (but presumably initiated, according to regional historians, by the Babylonian engineer Hibou Damous Domilieh) was divided into blocks or squares, all identical, of 35 by 70 meters each, separated by streets of varying length, depending on the undulating topography, the whole transected by two intersecting thoroughfares. Construction sites within the blocks were also identical, measuring three hundred square meters. The only vulnerable approach to this grid-pattern metropolis, along the plateau to the west, was ultimately sealed by the formidable walls, and protected by a number of monumental towers, penetrated only by the Palmyra Gate. A Cardo Maximus, or Straight Street, connected the colossal main portal with the Euphrates Gate at the river embankment to the east, with the green-planted fields of wheat, barley, lentils and grapes stretching to the horizon on the opposite shore. The only other access was gained through the South Gate on the wadi to the right.

The city enjoyed almost complete autonomy, perhaps headed by a military commander, since no evidence has ever been found of a People's Council, which would have been consistent with its Greek antecedents. Despite the Syrian majority the city was nevertheless, for all practical purposes, controlled by a Greek minority, by this time with aristocratic pretensions, which imposed its own language and customs; yet as far as is known, the various communities lived in relative harmony, each with its own residential quarter, its temples, baths, fountains, and public buildings. After the first century A.D., however, a Syrian faction, initially mixed but eventually defined in specific groups, effectively pressed the advantage of its growing numbers into a definitive political domination, as revealed in drawings, sculpture and mural painting. Prime example is the astonishing third century mural covering three enormous walls with depictions of the entire New Testament, discovered in the site and now on display, in a grand hall of its own, in the National Museum in Damascus.

By 247 B.C. the Persians had reengaged the entire Middle Euphrates. The Seleucids, otherwise absorbed in their repeated disputes with the rival Ptolemies in Egypt, were powerless to stave off the Parthian advance. During that period Doura Europos was governed by Ebistats, public councils in the official representation of the king in Ctisiphon. These were charged with civil and judicial administration, political economy, historical documentation and the care of the archives.

When the Romans entered Syria in 64 B.C. the Seleucid domination came to an end and with it the period of Hellenization of the Near East. At that time Doura Europos was in any case under Parthian political jurisdiction, while it remained bound to Palmyra as a trading partner. Although the official policy was one of support for the Greek colonies, for sensible reasons of commercial convenience, the emperor Augustus nonetheless committed Rome to an agreement with the Parthians, prolonging their self-government for more than a century. And with good reason. All testimony, deciphered from inscriptions, parchment or graffiti, verifies Doura Europos' prosperity during the Parthian years, its success in agriculture and caravan traffic, and especially in its continued trade with Palmyra. The frontier outpost was now a major market center in the Parthian heartland.

Parthian hegemony lasted in all more than three centuries, with a two-year parenthesis when Trajan, by this time emperor, decided to take a hand in the military installations in the citadel on the Euphrates, and sent troops to occupy the city from 115 to 117. On Trajan's advice his protégé and successor, Hadrian, continued to maintain a viable relationship with the Persians, though he ordered repairs on the great Citadel, which served as the palace for the military governor. This massive complex was isolated from the rest of the city by an interior wadi and protected by enormous fortifications facing the river, which included the "Parthian Palace" right on the embankment. In time, however, Doura Europos came to shed its military bearing. The grandiose Greek fortifications were cannibalized for the repair of the existing temples to Artemisa and Zeus Megistos, and of the agora that filled eight blocks in the heart of the urban center; and the construction of the towers of new temples, to Adonis, Zeus Theos and Zeus Kyrios, as well as to oriental deities Atargatis, Aphlad and Azzanathkona.

With the Roman conquest by Lucius Verus in 165, Doura Europos returned to its role as a military garrison, with lands north of the enclosure included in the Roman camp. Ramparts were repaired or restored. The Palace of the "Dux Ripae" ("Palace of the Roman Commander of the Riverbank") occupied the Citadel, reinventing it as a "Military Temple", so-called, while it incorporated its fortifications into the Euphrates Gate.

The "Strategic Palace" or "First Citadel" -- a complex initially established by the Greeks on a high cliff overlooking the Euphrates, as a residence for the strategos or First Magistrate -- was transformed into the "Redoubt Palace", with its spectacular command of life and traffic on the river.

Another sort of cult began to occupy blocks that had formerly been consigned to parks or public spaces: the dolichenium, the mithraeum, the synagogue, and a discreet Christian church. A number of these were backed up against the western wall, for support and protection from Sassanid raids, since in 199 Septimus Severus, the new emperor, decided to advance against Ctisiphon, thus provoking the Persians while breaking relations on the eastern front, all the time reinforcing the Roman command in Palmyra. Yet when Doura Europos finally gave way to Sassanid siege these were the temples that survived in a remarkable state of preservation, to be discovered in the twentieth century by dumbfounded archaeologists. Rostovtzeff dubbed the site "Pompeii in the Syrian Desert". From the first century A.D. art, which played an important role in the life of Doura Europos, was associated with the "Palmyrene School", and tended to feature Palmyrene deities, such as Bel - now evolved as "Baal"-Shemin. Scenes from the New Testament in the murals of the temple or of the family of Conon in the Temple of Bel, and the sacrifice of the Roman tribune Terentius in the Christian church, all constituted a unique documentation of the period and a revised definition of Christian art in the second and third centuries. During Caracalla's reign, however, the city was given what the Romans called "an aesthetic reorientation", c. 212 A.D., and Doura Europos was even rebaptized "Colonia Romania". Yet with this the city was granted tax exemptions that permitted the expansion of its commercial, as well as its cultural influence, throughout the Khabur basin.

The terrible siege that ended Doura Europos and the Sassanid devastation that laid waste to everything inside the enclosure followed on the heels of an earlier earthquake, which had already damaged the city walls. With this, time somehow stopped in its tracks. From the archaeological point of view the stratification of habitation remained undisturbed, in the levels that had risen, century upon century, waiting to be unearthed and deciphered, but somehow the debilitated fortifications, the temples, palaces, theater, Citadel, began to return to the desert. Yet the desert sands that covered it and the oblivion of the succeeding centuries guaranteed an unparalleled historical laboratory for the exploration and analysis of an isolated community, never embraced by any modern city.

The Sassanids attacked Doura Europos from the plateau, falling on the Palmyra Gate and trying, unsuccessfully as it happens, to tunnel underneath it. Roman sappers, whose corpses were discovered in the wreckage, blocked this strategy. The coins in their pockets verified the year: 256 A.D. Another attempt at tunneling under the nineteenth tower, just to the north of the main gate, was equally fruitless. The Romans again countered, but were overwhelmed, and disarmed, when the Sassanids poured across an assault ramp still visible in the southwest corner of the ramparts, next to the wadi.

The population of Doura Europos was deported to Iran in the east, though a small Sassanid contingent remained for a time to guard the site. There was precious little left to guard. After the departure of the Persian soldiers no one ever returned to inhabit the city. When the emperor Julian passed by a century later he found only destruction, with lions, gazelles, deer and jackals sharing the ruins with serpents and scorpions. In 363, when a group of Byzantine travelers rode through, they made note of the total abandonment of the city, save for a hermit saint, who left when they did. A ninth century Muslim garrison also stopped along its way, but was repelled by the desolation and moved out again.

The miracle of survival, however, remains in the mural paintings. When a multilingual, multicultural and in the end singularly resourceful population, faced with certain destruction by the Sassanids, took the precaution of piling large quantities of sand and dirt against the reinforced walls of the church, the synagogue and the Temple of Bel, creating what appeared to be a number of innocuous mounds, and in protecting their treasures they somehow assured that not only would the walls be saved from Persian undermining, but that the images painted on them would be preserved as well. Noteworthy is the fact of the pictures - figurative and representational-as a complete departure from Orthodox tradition, dating from the second year of the reign (244-9) of Phillip the Arab, during a period of severe persecution of the Jews in Palestine, from which they were unequivocally driven. Their colony in Doura Europos therefore confirms their ability to endure in an Eastern retreat, which most certainly influenced their style of painting and the treatment of the subject matter. When the Franco-American team, after 1928, discovered the hidden paintings, one of its members, Hopkins, in his report, described the amazement, after just thirty centimeters of sand had been removed, at seeing "whole scenes with their brilliant colors, figures and objects, leaping into view under the desert sun."

Texts in Greek and Latin and well as Syrian and Persian languages, along with coins, utensils, adornments, furnishings, fragments of textiles and broken pottery, described the peculiar cultural heritage of the Hellenized Near East, and became the only witnesses left in the site. And while they came to tell a rich story, it was often a contradictory one, and definitely incomplete. Many temples remain untouched and whole blocks of the city have yet to be excavated and documented. Blocks already explored have been vandalized or were exposed to the elements and could be irretrievably lost. Even with all of this, Doura Europos was unlike anything else in Asia, and for today's traveler remains so. Bare and dusty, blasted by the wind that roars off the river, baked by the sun, devoid even of vegetation save scrub brush, the ruins are nonetheless anything but vacant and doleful. They somehow shimmer in a diffused light, which forms a halo around the enclosure, and preserves not the sounds of the final battle but of ordinary people engaged in everyday affairs, buying, selling, mixing colors and painting their personal mythology, while they plant and worship, plant and persevere, thinking all the while that they inhabit the center of the universe and that it will last forever.

The Kingdom of Ebla

2005-06-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

The ruins of an ancient city called Ebla (modern Tel Mardikh) -- whose lavish and richly productive culture, c. 2250 B.C., was amply documented in the Mari archives, and referred to as well in nearly every relevant library, inscription and archive from Karkemish to Qatna -- are strewn across the rolling green landscape of western Syria, some 55 kilometers south of Aleppo and just three kilometers east of the Aleppo-Damascus highway, in the jurisdiction of Idlib, 26 kilometers to the northwest.

Historical Ebla is mentioned specifically as a center of far-reaching political and military impact, as well as commercial influence, in Akkadian texts c. 2300 B.C., inscriptions from Alalakh (Tell Atchanah) in the Amuq plain, c. 1750 B.C., and from Emar (Meskeneh), c. 1400 B.C. References appear as well in the annals of Thutmose III as described on the walls of Karnak, and Hittite texts from Anatolia. Its precise whereabouts, however, was still a mystery, until the eventual soundings across sixty hectares, at a selected location on Tell Mardikh, revealed the ruins of the public buildings, perimeter walls, palaces and temples of the archaeological Ebla, "White Rock", referring to the natural limestone hill which ultimately evolved into the acropolis of a political and economic power stretching from the Taurus mountains to the north, the Euphrates to the east, and Hama to the south.

According to the findings, beginning in 1964, of the Italian archaeological mission from the Rome university of "La Sapienza", under the direction of Paolo Matthiae, Ebla reached its peak during the mid-Third Millennium as the capital of a mighty kingdom, with rich trade connections across the region, as documented in an astonishing cache of 8000 clay tablets unearthed between 1974 and 1976.

The Ebla tablets, written in a Canaanite language now defined as Eblaite, were sufficiently detailed and convincing to have led to the revision of every prior assumption regarding Third Millennium urban structure, Amorite expansion of the period, and Ebla's role, not only as an independent kingdom but as a key player among the dominant regional hegemonies, particularly as an ally of the nearby kingdom of Yamkhad, with its capital in Aleppo.

Texts from Emar along with the virtually contemporary material from Ougarit, texts from Alalakh IV and VII, and the vast archives from Mari, combined with the evidence from Ebla's own archives, provide an extraordinarily vital picture of a cosmopolitan and distinctive regional Syrian culture, based on independent city-states whose destinies were interwoven as a result of their commercial and political alliances, as well as their inevitable rivalries. The larger empires to the north, east and south frequently dominated them, but they nevertheless preserved their individual cultural identity, which has only begun to be understood more fully over the last half of the twentieth century.

Ebla, one of the most interesting and far-reaching among them all, has yielded invaluable archaeological material, including palaces, library, temples, a strongly fortified city-wall, and subterranean tombs analogous to those found slightly later in Ougarit, all of which indicate the city's ascendance, collapse and revival as an important urban center.

The Italians were initially attracted to Ebla because of indications of Early and Middle Bronze Age occupation, yet excavations revealed even earlier habitation, dating from the site of a late Fourth Millennium village, followed by an early proto-Syrian settlement, containing substantial remains of a singular pottery type known as khirbet kerak.

The "lower town" occupies nearly 45 hectares. It was enclosed by a high, fortified wall, in effect a gigantic rampart of earth and stone, penetrated by four gateways, presumably the accesses to the four quarters of the Bronze Age city, with its population numbering in the tens of thousands. One of these gateways, still on view, is lined with blocks of black and white stone, corresponding to the Middle Bronze Age (level IIIA).

In the center of the enclosure is the Tel, or acropolis, crowned by the remains of palaces and administrative structures indicated, among other relics, by Bronze Age basalt basins, their frontal panels, or orthostats, exquisitely carved in relief in varying styles - with influence from Cappadocia to Karkemish to the Euphrates-and a turreted temple. The inscribed fragment of a votive statue, unearthed in this temple during the 1968 archaeological season, bears a cuneiform dedication to Ishtar, with a commemorative text attributed to the Amorite monarch Ibbit-Lim. Sources are divided as to whether he was a king of Ebla or of Mari. It may be reasonable to assume he was king of Mari at a time of Amorite domination of Ebla, thus placing it under Mari's jurisdiction. In any case, the inscription, corresponding to the Middle Bronze Level I period (contemporary with the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur, c. 2000 B.C.), allowed the site of Tell Mardikh to be identified with Ebla.

Excavations in the area of the Ishtar temple revealed a courtyard and two walls that had presumably formed part of a brick palace dating from the Early Bronze Age (Period IIB1, c. 2400-2300 B.C.) A low dais, possibly part of a throne, occupies a space to one side of the entranceway to the courtyard. Adjacent stairs were decorated with mosaics on wooden panels that are now exhibited in the on-site museum a short distance from the excavations.

At right angles to the throne a wider flight of graceful and well-proportioned stone steps rose very gently to an upper level of construction, now vanished. Projecting into the courtyard was the small room where the clay tablets were stored. The palace had been thoroughly and maliciously torched, but the fire, instead of contributing to the deterioration of the mud-brick tablets, served to preserve them, hard as rocks and for all practical purposes, indestructible.

Over two thousand documents were recovered from this one deposit. Local scribes employing the regional version of the cuneiform tradition had imprinted the tablets. Translations have revealed a variety of letters, treaties, administrative documents dealing with taxes -- usually associated with textiles or metals -- lists of supplies for the royal family, procedures for visitors, rather pragmatic ritual texts, instructions relating to incantations or magical spells without any special theological or mystical obsession, and political chronology. Ebla's most powerful king was listed as Ebrium, or Ibrium, who concluded the so-called "Treaty with Ashur", which offered the Assyrian king Tudia the use of trading post officially controlled by Ebla.

The fifth and last king of Ebla during this period was Ebrium's son, Ibbi-Sipish, the first to succeed in a dynastic line, thus breaking with the established Eblaite custom of electing its ruler for a fixed term of office, lasting seven years. This absolutism may have contributed to the unrest that was ultimately instrumental in the city's decline. Meantime, however, the reign of Ibbi-Sipish was considered a time of inordinate prosperity, in part because the king was given to frequent travel abroad. It was recorded both in Ebla and Aleppo that he concluded specific treaties with neighboring Army, as Aleppo was called at the time.

The Third Millennium archives offer nothing in the way of literature, as such. They do, however, offer a microcosmic view of an industrious, energetic, well-ordered style of living in a prosperous kingdom, with control over the sources of timber in the mountains to the west; and particularly occupied with the raising of sheep and the producing of woolen textiles. The textiles of Ebla are in fact mentioned in documents from as far away as the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

Two palace complexes, jointly referred to as "Palace G" - including the so-called "Ceremonial Wing", the "Administrative Wing", the "Residential Wing", and the royal archives -- occupy the area around the base of the tel. Since Ebla was destroyed on two occasions the structures may have been contemporary but more likely they were superimposed. The earlier destruction is generally attributed to Sargon of Akkad, who claimed that Dagan had "given him" Ebla and Mari, among other key sites in the region. On the other hand, it was his grandson, Naram-Sin, who claimed the god Nergal had given him Armanum (possibly Aleppo) and Ebla, "which no king had previously destroyed." Archaeology has nonetheless determined that the archaic palace was occupied in two phases, one in the Early Bronze IV and again in the Middle Bronze II, the second structure built over the ruins of the prior construction, which thus determined its shape, as well as the distribution of the rooms. These included a room filled with appliances for the grinding of grains. Archaeologists have referred to the grain as "corn", which could only have been the case in the event of an exchange with Mesoamerica, feasible, not unlikely, but to date not fully documented.

Objects unearthed in the palace ruins suggested constant contact with Babylonia, or with the styles in vogue there. Decorative items or objects of personal adornment had been confected of gold, lapis lazuli and ivory, while cylinder seals portray variations on Babylonian motifs. Among the most important pieces are the diminutive statuette of a kneeling, human-headed bull, its wooden body covered with gold leaf and the dressed Assyrian style beard of steatite; but limestone figures representing soldiers or priests, deities and deified animals were also found, in an aesthetic similar to the Sumerian style patent in Mari but confected not of crystallized gypsum, as along the Euphrates, but rather of various combinations of steatite, lapis lazuli, white limestone and gold. Especially remarkable is the stylized leopard standing perfectly erect on its hind legs. And really amazing is the rustic abstraction of an anthropomorphic Euphrates ox, with his stylized, almost infantile, beard. Curiously however, the fragments of carved wooden furniture had been inlaid with mother-of-pearl or stone, sometimes gold-plated, and in a style more commonly associated with Egypt.

A group of royal tombs was discovered by sheer accident, to one side of the palace complex. The collapse of a roof revealed the rich contents in the chambers below. Pieces discovered inside the "Tomb of the Lord of the Goats", for example, included an Egyptian mace handle in silver, gold and alabaster, bearing the name of a Thirteenth Dynasty pharaoh -- Hetepibre Harnejheryotef, who reigned between 1775 and 1765 B.C. -- as well as lovely gold jewelry in styles associated both with Babylonia and the Levant, and ivory carvings in the Egyptian fashion of the time. These may have been gifts of state from the various rulers across the region. Ebla was again sacked by the advance of the Hittite armies, under Murshili I or Hattusili I, c. 1600 B.C., bound for their conquest of Amorite Babylonia. Corresponding to this period are the Western Palace (Palace Q, called "The Palace of the Crown Prince") with the royal necropolis, as well as the Northern Palace ("Palace P"), Palace E, and various temples - dedicated to Shamash, the Sun God; to Hadad, God of Storms, Rain and Fertility of the Earth; to Reshef, God of the Underworld; and to the Royal Ancestors, as well as a newer version of a temple to Ishtar -- among other constructions. Yet despite the rampant destruction, Ebla continued to thrive well into the Middle Bronze Age.

The Italian team also found subsequent settlement strata, including traces of occupation during the Aramean period, 720-535 B.C., the Persian period that followed, and into the Hellenistic period until about 200 B.C. Roman remains, however, are practically nonexistent, and Byzantine habitation is confined to the discovery of a small Christian hermitage at the foot of the acropolis, dating from the seventh century A.D. After that, it would appear, Ebla was abandoned and forgotten.

Ebla's importance, however, and its impact on the archaeological assessment of a long period of cultural history over a wide geographical area, can never be overestimated. The beauty of the site, furthermore, and its rich aesthetic, make its ruins as attractive as are its artistic treasures, on display in the on-site museum, as well as in the museums of Idlib, Hama, Aleppo and Damascus.

Le Royaume d'Ougarit

2005-06-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

Géographie du Royaume d'Ougarit.

Le royaume de l'Ougarit est situé sur la côte syrienne, c'est-à-dire dans la corne occidentale du Croissant fertile, située entre Antioche au nord et Gaza au sud, qui est bordée à l'ouest par la mer Méditerranée et à l'est par l'importante faille géologique orientée du nord au sud, où coulent l'Oronte en direction du nord, le Litani et le Jourdain en direction du sud. Sa superficie, évaluée aux environs de 2000 km2 (Saadé 1979: 33), correspond à peu près à celle de l'actuelle province de Lattaquié.

On peut déterminer quelles étaient les frontières du royaume à partir des archives mises au jour sur le site archéologique de Ras Shamra, l'ancienne Ougarit qui était la capitale de ce royaume, située à un peu plus de dix kms au nord de l'actuelle Lattaquié et à quelques centaines de mètres du meilleur port de la côte syrienne qui est aujourd'hui l'anse de Minet el beida. Grâce au texte d'un traité conclu entre le roi hittite et le roi d'Ougarit au XIVe siècle av. J.-C. en vue de délimiter la frontière avec le Mougish, aujourd'hui la région d'Antioche, on sait que la frontière passait par la chaîne montagneuse dont le point culminant à 1800 m d'altitude est le Gabal al Aqra, que les ougaritains appelaient le Saphon. Ce sommet, aujourd'hui en Turquie, est visible par temps clair depuis le site d'Ougarit, situé à une cinquantaine de kms. Le même traité montre que l'Ougarit était borné par des frontières naturelles depuis Birzihé, près du chateau croisé de Bourzé qui domine la vallée de l'Oronte, jusqu'à la Méditerranée et que la région septentrionale pouvait être identifiée avec l'ensemble du bassin des cours d'eau tributaires du Nahr al Kebir. Ce fleuve côtier, qui était appelé à l'âge du bronze le Rahbanou, littéralement «le large», prend ses sources dans le massif du Gabal al Aqra et se jette dans la mer à quelques kilomètres au sud de Lattaquié. Principale voie de pénétration depuis la côte vers la Syrie intérieure, son rôle fut essentiel dans le trafic interne au royaume. Bordé à l'ouest par la Méditerranée, le royaume avait comme frontière naturelle orientale la chaîne montagneuse, encore appelée montagne des Alaouites ou Gabal Al Ansariyeh, qui est elle-même longée à l'est par la vallée de l'Oronte. Il est d'autre part possible que l'Ougarit ait contrôlé, pendant certaines périodes, des territoires situés outre-Oronte. La frontière méridionale située au sud de la plaine de Gablé, incluant de manière épisodique le royaume de Siyannou, était probablement marquée par le nahr es Sinn, cours d'eau bref et abondant dont la source jaillit sous le seuil rocheux qui sépare la plaine côtière de Gablé de l'anse de Banias.

De telles frontières ont certainement contribué à donner une forte identité géographique, économique, voire nationale, à ce royaume syrien dont l'histoire nous est connue pour l'essentiel à la fin de l'âge du bronze récent, soit au XIIIe siècle av. J.C. A l'abri de leurs frontières naturelles, les ougaritains ont tiré le meilleur parti possible d'une position géographique exceptionnelle. Mahadou, le port de la métropole et les autres villes côtières les mettaient en contact avec le monde égéen grâce au relais de l'île de Chypre dont l'extrémité orientale n'est distante que de 70 kms. En direction de l'Orient, Ougarit se trouvait à la latitude d'Émar, ville située sur le coude de l'Euphrate, à partir de laquelle le cours du fleuve, auparavant dirigé vers le sud-ouest, s'infléchit vers le sud-est. C'est entre Ougarit et Émar que la distance du trajet terrestre vers l'Euphrate était la plus brève et permettait les ruptures de charge les plus avantageuses. L'activité des commerçants ougaritains contribuait ainsi à mettre en relations des régions aussi éloignées l'une de l'autre que l'île de Crète (Kapt¨ru) d'où l'on importait céréales, boissons, huile etc., et les montagnes d'Afghanistan d'où l'on extrayait le lapis lazuli.
L'hydrographie a contribué aussi à marquer la personnalité de l'Ougarit. En effet, le Croissant fertile correspond à l'isohyète de 250 mm; ce terme technique désigne la ligne imaginaire séparant une zone où il tombe plus de 250 mm de pluie par an d'une autre zone où il tombe moins de 250 mm de pluie par an. Cette limite est importante car elle permet de distinguer les régions où, dans l'attente des pluies d'automne, l'irrigation est utile pendant les années sèches mais où l'irrigation n'est pas indispensable pendant les années de pluviosité normale. On appelle ces zones humides des régions de «culture à la pluie» pour les distinguer des régions où l'agriculture suppose impérativement, comme en Mésopotamie, le creusement de canaux d'irrigation. Le territoire du royaume est situé à l'intérieur de cette limite de 250 mm et le massif du Gabal Al Aqra reçoit une pluviosité encore bien supérieure. Cet élément d'ordre climatique a joué un rôle important dans l'élaboration des mythes agraires d'Ougarit dont l'un rapporte que Haddou, dieu de l'orage et de la pluie, plus connu sous son titre Baal: «Maître», doit se livrer à un combat annuel contre Mot, sorte d'entité personnifiant la sécheresse et la mort. La fonction de ce mythe était d'assurer le renouvellement annuel des cultures vivrières et l'on n'aurait pas pu trouver un cadre climatique mieux approprié qu'une telle région où pouvait se pratiquer la «culture à la pluie». Le récit raconte que Baal, vaincu et livré à la merci de son rival, doit descendre dans le sein de la terre. Interviennent alors les déesses : Anatou qui préside aux eaux souterraines d'où naissent les sources, et Shapshou, la déesse solaire, qui préside à l'évaporation des eaux répandues sur la terre. Toutes deux rassemblent la substance du corps de Baal qu'elles transportent jusqu'à son palais du mont Saphon, aujourd'hui le Gabal al Aqra, au nord de la ville d'Ougarit. C'est aussi du Saphon que le dieu se manifeste par des précipitations orageuses d'automne après avoir été ramené à la vie grâce aux soins des déesses Anatou et Shapshou. La présence du dieu dans sa résidence montagneuse devait être particulièrement sensible à l'automne qui est le moment du retour de la pluie espéré depuis des mois. C'est le moment où des orages, observables à plusieurs dizaines de kilomètres à la ronde à l'intérieur de la Syrie, éclatent sur le Gabal al Aqra, manifestant avec éclat le retour du dieu dans son palais.
De même, il est vraisemblable qu'il faut localiser dans cette même région le mythe du combat de Baal contre Yam, la mer. La proximité entre le Gabal al Aqra et la mer (l'altitude de ce massif culmine à près de 1800 m, et sa distance de la mer est de trois km au maximum à vol d'oiseau) explique l'apparition d'un «effet de montagne», bien connu en Méditerranée. Ce phénomène météorologique consiste en l'accumulation autour du sommet Gabal al Aqra de nuages abondants à l'origine d'orages spectaculaires dont les éclairs sont attirés par la mer. De telles tempêtes automnales et hivernales ont impressionné pécheurs, marins et voyageurs qui ont certainement considéré la région située au nord de la baie de Ras al Bassit comme le lieu par excellence du conflit entre la mer et le dieu de l'orage; l'apparition de lames et d'une forte houle étant interprétées comme la riposte de la mer aux coups que lui assène le dieu. Le cadre géographique des deux principaux mythes d'Ougarit se trouve par conséquent à l'intérieur du royaume: le combat de Baal contre la mer est mené par le dieu depuis sa résidence montagneuse du Saphon et le combat de Baal contre la mort y trouvera son épilogue heureux avec le retour du dieu dans son palais (Bordreuil 1990).

Le royaume était divisé en trois grandes régions géographiques mentionnées dans des listes qui énumèrent les corvées fournies par divers villages. Ces régions regroupaient plusieurs circonscriptions administratives. L'une de ces régions, appelée Arrou, correspondait à la plaine qui entoure la ville actuelle de Gablé, la Gabala de l'époque gréco-romaine. On sait que la frontière méridionale de l'Ougarit était située au sud de cette ville puisque Gibalaya (gbly) est mentionnée parmi les villes portuaires du royaume et peut-être le Nahr es Sinn garde-t-il jusqu'à aujourd'hui le souvenir du royaume de Siyannou dont parlent les textes d'Ougarit et le chapitre 10 de la Genèse. Plusieurs villes mentionnées dans les textes relevaient aussi de cette région comme Atallig, Oushkenou, Milkou, etc. La chaîne montagneuse qui sépare la plaine côtière de la vallée de l'Oronte paraît avoir constitué une autre région : Gourou dont le nom signifie «la Montagne». Les environs de la capitale éponyme de l'Ougarit représentaient vraisemblablement une autre circonscription où se trouvait l'importante cité littorale voisine mise au jour sur le Ras Ibn Hani. La ville de Halba Sapani, identifiable aux environs de l'actuelle Kassab, était probablement le chef lieu de la région septentrionale appelée Sapanou .
On voit que les paysages du royaume ont servi à brosser le décor des exploits et des démêlés divins qui sont décrits dans les textes mythologiques d'Ougarit. Un fragment alphabétique découvert en 1992 évoque l'activité de la déesse Ashtart dans le Rahbanou-nahr al kebir, cours d'eau qui bornait probablement au nord Arrou considérée comme la partie méridionale du royaume d'Ougarit. Dans un texte mythologique «la déesse Anat monte sur Ourou, sur Arrou et sur Sapanou» et ces trois noms de région rassemblés en une seule phrase exprimaient certainement dans la langue des mythes les principales composantes régionales de l'Ougarit (Bordreuil 1984).

Une tablette découverte dans les fouilles de Ras Ibn Hani énumère divers troupeaux de bovins qui étaient répartis, probablement pour l'estivage, dans plusieurs villages du royaume. Or, plusieurs de ces villages ont pu être localisés sur la frontière nord et cela est certainement en relation avec l'activité pastorale de cette région septentrionale abondante en pâturages. Riche en prairies et en sources d'eau, vouée à l'élevage des bovins et des ovins, cette montagne était aussi couverte de forêts. On en veut pour preuve le nom d'une ville de la région du nord : Halba Sapani: littéralement «la forestière du Saphon» qui était vraisemblablement située près de l'actuelle Kassab. D'autre part, les textes nous parlent de quelques autres Halba dans le royaume d'Ougarit, dont au moins deux se trouvaient dans la chaîne orientale. Il faut donc se représenter ces deux massifs montagneux couverts de forêts vastes et profondes dont il ne subsiste aujourd'hui que quelques vestiges comme la forêt de Fourlloq dans les environs de l'actuelle Kassab. On peut donc considérer que les activités forestières et pastorales pratiquées dans la région septentrionale étaient complémentaires des activités agricoles de la région méridionale, elle-même riche de sources issues de la chaîne alaouite et d'un terroir fertile. Dans une liste, récemment publiée, des principaux acteurs divins des mythes d'Ougarit, la mention «les dieux du pays» (il bldn) suggère que la convergence de données relevant de la géographie physique (orographie et climatologie) et de la géographie économique, ont favorisé l'émergence, dans la civilisation d'Ougarit, d'une certaine identité nationale.

Source : www.ougarit.com