Union Académique Internationale

Project nº90, adopted in 2015

Launched in 1988, this project arose out of the publication of texts from the Archives Royales de Mari, tomes XXVI/1 and XXVI/2, of 640 and 590 pages respectively, producing several collections of letters discovered by André Parrot at the ancient tell of Mari, on the border of Syria and Iraq. The plan for this undertaking was to systematically study the vocabulary of the most important corpus in an Eastern Semitic language, written in cuneiform and found in the ruins of the palace of Mari. The corpus represents a vast amount of documentation, made up of more than 25,000 tablets. While literary texts are a minor part, it also contains a considerable epistolary corpus, addressed to two kings of Mari. This is complemented by numerous administrative and judicial documents. The language, properly named as Akkadian, is also traditionally called "paleo-Babylonian" since Babylon is the most famous city to have used it, and its king, Hammurabi, is still known to us today. The documents cover only about fifty years (from the XIXth to XVIIIth centuries BCE),for their confirmed dating. The texts, however, come from the whole of the Near East, even from presently undocumented sites for this era such as Aleppo or Northern Syria. The letters are now pinpointed to a precise time and place. Taken as a whole, these texts are a considerable addition to the knowledge of the classical state of Eastern Semitic, which is closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. The lexical compilation stemming from their discovery is extremely rich. Furthermore, the people, though expressing themselves in Akkadian, had to resort to local terms in order to designate activities or situations that had no equivalent in their written language. They reveal then the vocabulary of a people who mainly practiced oral communication, and used undocumented dialects for written expression. Thus we find idiomatic expressions thought to have been documented only for far more recent eras. There are not only these idioms but also never before seen registers of expression, such as proverbs or direct expression from the female population. In this sense, the epistolary literature of Mari is a unicum in the Near East. Our complete retranslation of the letters brought out before tome XXVI of the Royal Archives of Mari/Archives Royales de Mari resulted in the publication of three large volumes from LAPO (Littératures Anciennes du Proche-Orient): tomes 16 (1997, 654 p.), 17 (1998, p. 688), 18 (2000, p. 632) — several re-editions — alongside an ample lexical commentary. This represents the result of the collation of the originals in the museums of Aleppo, Damascus and Dêr ez-Zor. The vocabulary of the administrative texts has been divided up in to several sections under the heading of MDBP (Matériaux pour le Dictionnaire de Babylonien de Mari/Materials for the Babylonian Dictionary of Mari) which brings together the technical terms while ensuring the critical edition of administrative documents, published or not. The volumes published at present are as follows: MDBP I (2009, p. 604) = ARM XXX, La Nomenclature des habits et des textiles (The Nomenclature of Costume and Textiles), by J.-M. Durand ; MDBP II (2005, p. 570) = ARM XXXI, La Vaisselle de luxe des rois de Mari (Luxury Tableware of the Kings of Mari), by M. Guichard ; MDBP III (2012, p. 538) = ARM XXXII, Le Vocabulaire de la métallurgie et la nomenclature des objets en métal dans les textes de Mari (Metallurgical Vocabulary and the Nomenclature of Metal Objects in the Mari Texts), by Ilya Arkhipov (University of Moscow), from us collations and transcriptions. Tome XII (2009) of the Florilegium Marianum, the other series dedicated to publications about Mari, is an exhaustive study of the documentation on wine by Grégory Chambon (then at the Université de Bretagne Orientale, UBO). Tome XV (2018) joins the former in the Florilegium Marianum, dealing with the management and the accounts of grain in the palace of Mari by Grégory Chambon (EHESS). Tome XVI of the same series (2018) deals with the vocabulary of irrigation, by Hervé Reculeau (University of Chicago). Finishing an authorization to direct research, L. Marti will then be able to publish documentation dealing with meat alimentation. As regards the epistolary documents, we have just added tome XXXIII (2019) to tomes XXVII and XXVIII, which in 595 pages deals with the early reign of Zimrî-Lîm. Tome XXXIV, currently undergoing preparation, should complete the former and deal more specifically with documentation relating to the Nomads. As with the Indices of the LAPO or ARM XXXIII, each publication includes a detailed study of the vocabulary and does much to complete the dictionaries we have at our disposition. Once brought together as a whole, these lexical considerations will be a major contribution to the Semitic lexicon used in the second millenium before the common era, as revealed by the cuneiform documents of Mari. The recent dramatic events in Syria put the Mari originals in danger of destruction. Having survived intact across millennia, no one knows now where in Syria they can presently be found. Well before the troubles, however, with the support of the CNRS and French Foreign Affairs, we took care to record the documents both in Syria and Paris by means of either analog or digital photography, prior to the Syrian authorities’ demand for repatriation. That documentation has now been digitized. With this precautionary mesure, we can envision continuing the work of deciphering and of publishing, even if potentially, once peace has returned, certain suggestions concerning the surviving originals might hypothetically be considered. Remembering that one of Assyriology’s founders was Jules Oppert, professor at the Collège de France, it is important that these works allow French-language scholarship to persist in the field. The dictionary (DBP), nevertheless, has to include the equivalents of French terms in the great languages of Middle Eastern studies in Europe. It will therefore be a multilingual work in which the aspect of the ‘history of techniques’ must not be left aside.