Abstract
This work sets forth the important sigillographical material that was brought to light during the salvage excavations at Meskéné, the site of ancient Emar. These excavations were carried out by Prof. Jean Margueron‘s team during the 70‘s, while the Syrian authorities constructed the el-Assad dam in the Euphrates loop. The Bronze Age ancient Syrian city of Emar, belonging to the country of Aštata, had been moved and refounded by the Hittites during the XIVth century BC when they established their empire in northern Syria. An important number of cuneiform tablets dicovered there, belonging for the greater part to private archives, are dated from the end of the XIVth to the beginning XIIth century BC. These records, mainly sale contracts or testaments, have revealed hundreds of seal impressions, generally those of witneses or contractors among which simple citizens but also, naturally, civil servants, the city elders and even Emar‘s king and the god Ninurta.
The considerable interest of these records lies in the fact that they fully enlighten the different currents of influence which met at this cross-road at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and also their impact on local traditions. In the field of glyptic iconography these traditions are themselves quite complex, since at Emar features which were specifically Syrian had long been mixed with a Babylonian-inspired repertoire. The widely propagated Mitannian iconography also played an important role. Still, the most outstanding element in XIIIth century BS Emar is the development of an imagery of Hittite, or more exactly Syro-Hittite style. Themes which Hittite Anatolia reserved for the circular seals or for the reliefs of rock-sanctuaries are widely present on cylinder and signet seals. The fashion of transliterations into Hittite hieroglyphic characters the Semetic names of Emar inhabitants - and not only those of local representatives of the Hittite empire - is another remarkable phenomenon. Thes evolution was brutally interrupted not by the city‘s downfall which occured in c. 1180 BS when the Hittite empire as a whole came to a sudden end.
Beyer, Dominique