Mari and Its Archives
A city on the middle Euphrates keeps twenty thousand letters—a cross-section of daily life.
Mari stood at the crossroads between Mesopotamia, Syria and the Mediterranean, living off trade and tolls on the caravans. The palace of Zimri-Lim, with its hundreds of rooms, burned when Hammurabi took the city—and the baked tablets survived. In them are envoys' dispatches, marriage contracts, price reports, governors' complaints, and disputes with nomad tribes whose names and customs are close to those known from the traditions of the patriarchs. Some twenty thousand letters and administrative records were found in the palace. No other archive shows the Near East of the second millennium so fully and so matter-of-factly.
Sources
Documents of the period
- cuneiform chronicles and king lists — some twenty thousand letters from the palace archive of Mari
Scholarship
- archaeology of Mesopotamia — the palace of Zimri-Lim, burnt by Hammurabi and so preserving the tablets
Basis: documents and evidence.