Middle Euphrates Polities of the Bronze Age and Their Place in the Typology of Ancient States
Journal: Social Evolution & History. Volume 24, Number 2 / September 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2025.02.14
Boris Alexandrov
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
During the Bronze Age, several significant polities emerged in the Middle Euphrates region. This area was strategically important, as it controlled the major waterway connecting Southern Mesopotamia and Syria. Situated at the crossroads, the region was exposed to a wide range of political, cultural, and ideological influences.
The history of the Middle Euphrates states is documented by a vast corpus of epigraphic sources, written in Mesopotamian cuneiform, primarily in the Akkadian language. The earliest written evidence of political developments in the region dates back to the second half of the third millennium BC. At the beginning of the second millennium BC, the royal archives from Mari (modern-day Tell Ḥarīrī, Syria) shed important light not only on local conditions, but also on the broader situation in Northern and Southern Mesopotamia and throughout the wider Near East. However, the chronological scope of these archives is limited to just a few decades. It was only in the Late Bronze Age (15th–12th centuries BC) that cuneiform archives covering a considerable time span of up to 150–200 years were encountered. Among these, the archives of the ancient city of Emar (modern Tell Mesekene, Syria) stand out.1 More than 1,500 cuneiform texts illuminate its political and religious institutions, legal practices, and social relations.2 One of the peculiar traits of the Emarite political system was its underdeveloped institution of royal power, for which the term ‘limited kingship’ was coined in secondary literature (Fleming 1992). This feature sets Emar in sharp contrast to such prototypical Ancient Near Eastern states as Egypt or the various city-states and kingdoms of Mesopotamia.3
Specialists working with the Emar corpus have advanced several approaches to accounting for the city's specific socio-political organization. Daniel Arnaud believed that it was based on a system of family clans (Arnaud 1981; 1987). These clans asserted the principles of collectivism and social justice, and their powerful influence, embodied primarily through assemblies, inhibited the full development of other political institutions. Arnaud proposed that this clan system was a direct legacy from a nomadic past, when the ancestors of the Emarites were pastoralists in the steppes adjacent to the Middle Euphrates Valley. This concept was challenged by Jean-Marie Durand, who argued that institutions such as the council of elders and assemblies originated in the urban culture of the third millennium BC, predating the migrations of the nomadic Amorites into the region around 2000 BC. He maintained that these institutions were not based on blood relations, but on common residence (Durand 1990). According to Durand, Emar was not a unique case, but rather one manifestation of a distinct Euphrates civilization characterized by its own developed cities and towns.
Similar to the city's collective bodies of power, the Emarite kingship has also received divergent interpretations in scholarly literature. According to some scholars, it was a recent innovation introduced by the Hittites who sought to create a more effective and coherent system of control over Emar which they conquered in the second half of the fourteenth century BC (e.g., Pruzsinszky 2007: 32). The Emarite monarchy, embedded into the pre-existing system of collective power, was consequently unable to attain a status comparable to that of Mesopotamian or Anatolian kings. Alternatively, other Assyriologists dispute this view, stating that some form of individual rule existed at Emar prior to the Hittite conquest (Viano 2010: 146). Another perspective argues that there was a genuine form of kingship in place at Emar in both the pre-Hittite and Hittite periods, claiming that it was a distinctive type that had more affinities with ancient Syrian traditions rather than with the Mesopotamian model (Seminara 2024).
Furthermore, scholars have attempted to analyze the Emarite system from a more theoretical and comparative perspective. One such approach is the so-called two-sector model, which posits that variability in socio-economic and political dynamics across the Ancient Near East can be explained by the relationship between two major societal segments: the state-temple (or royal) sector, on the one hand, and the communal (or private) sector, on the other. This relationship was in turn deeply influenced by the geographic and economic conditions of the region. For instance, alluvial plains that permitted intensive irrigation agriculture had a particularly significant impact on their populations. According to this model, Bronze Age states can be categorized into three types:
(1) those where the state sector predominates over the communal sector (Southern Mesopotamia, Elam);
(2) those where the state completely absorbs communal structures (Egypt); and
(3) those with a relative balance between the two sectors (the so-called peripheral civilizations of the alluvial plains, including Syria, northern Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Armenian Highlands).
Originally elaborated by Igor M. Diakonoff based on Mesopotamian data (Diakonoff 1982; Diakonoff and Yakobson 1982), this model was later applied in detail by his students and followers to other regions. Among them, Michael Heltzer viewed Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra near Latakia in Syria) on the Mediterranean coast and Emar as societies with many similarities. However, unlike Emar, Ugarit developed a fully-fledged monarchical and bureaucratic regime, a difference that may be attributed to its geographic location and its deep involvement in political and commercial exchanges with the leading powers of the day. Thus, Ugarit is largely characterized as belonging to the third group of the Bronze Age states.
The situation at Emar was markedly different due to its lack of a powerful kingship and bureaucracy. Heltzer considers this to be an archaism derived from the tribal past of the Emarite population (Heltzer 2001). On the whole, with its dominance of communal institutions, Emar should be considered a special case, even within the third group of states according to Diakonoff's classification.4
Nowadays, the two-sector model faces substantial criticism in scholarship. As an alternative, the concept of patrimonial society has been proposed to describe social relations and politics in Ugarit and other Late Bronze Age Syrian states (Schloen 2001). However, data from Emar has not been integrated into this new hypothesis.
Probably, several aspects of Emar's internal organization do not align well with the two-sector model. First, the written sources reveal no evidence of a substantial palatial economic sector. This indicates that the role of the kings was restricted not only politically but also in economic affairs. Second, on the opposite end of the social spectrum, the communal clan-based ownership was a rare phenomenon, while individual land property was widespread. The nuclear family prevailed at Emar and there was no evidence for powerful clans in the city of the kind documented in the Old Babylonian archives from Mari. Similarly, there are no attested cases of agricultural land repartition (Viano 2010). Third, the scenario central to the two-sector model – that the decline of the Late Bronze Age was precipitated by a social crisis (including indebtedness and pauperization caused by the state's over-exploitation of the communal sector and the privatization of the state land by officials) – finds no confirmation in the Emar sources (Viano 2023).
Consequently, scholars are still searching for a model that can adequately account for the peculiarities of Emar, and significant work remains to be done to frame them within a clear theoretical perspective. Previous research has devoted considerable attention to the Hittite, Mesopotamian, and Old Syrian (Eblaite) influences on the Emarite culture and society. However, the long period of Mitannian hegemony over the region has often been overlooked in these studies. The primary reason for this gap is undoubtedly the scarcity of available sources. Nevertheless, given the constant, though slow, expansion of the epigraphic corpus related to Mitanni and the Hurrians, a comparative analysis with the evidence from Emar may yet prove fruitful.
FUNDING
The article was written with the financial support of the Russian Science Foundation grant no. 25-28-00652 «Община в цивилиза-ционных моделях древнего Ближнего Востока и Мезоамерики: генезис, структура, региональное своеобразие» / ‘Community in the civilizational models of the Ancient Near East and Mesoamerica: genesis, structure, regional specifics’, https://rscf.ru/project/25-28-00652.
NOTES
1 Other archives are represented, first of all, by Ekalte / Tell-Munbaqa (89 tablets) and Azu / Tell-Ḥadīdī (15 tablets) for which see Mayer 2001; Torrecilla 2014; 2019. These archives reflect socio-political and legal realities very close to those of Emar.
2 This number is adduced by Pruzsinszky and Solans 2015: 318. According to more prudent estimates, the Emar corpus amounts to several hundred tablets (Rutz 2013).
3 This restricted nature of the Emarite kingship is manifested in the following key aspects: 1) the limited role of the king in ritual life; 2) the absence of royal inscriptions glorifying the person of the king, his achievements, or piety; 3) limited participation in legal procedures as a judge and arbiter; 4) the necessity to share administrative and judicial powers with other institutions, such as elders, the city assembly, Ninurta (god), the mayor, ‘brothers’; 5) scant economic resources (with no evidence of a vast royal domain or property on public land).
4 The Emar archives were published after the main publications on the two-sector model had been released. However, the specific situation in this ancient city was in a way anticipated by the proponents of the model. For instance, Carlo Zaccagnini argued that the communal (village) sector could be more powerful than the state in the regions like Syria and Anatolia (Zaccagnini 1981: 22; cf. also Diakonoff, Yakobson 1982: 5).
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