Travel Guide Mari

Despite a glorious past and a reputation for choice, the Mari site has lost much of its interest in recent years. Of course, it is not without a pinch to the heart that highly informed archeologists and historians discover this site. But it must be recognized that if Mari is a milestone for history lovers, it is more difficult to appreciate for a neophyte. It's a Bedouin family watching the site.The excavations pursued almost continuously since 1933 by André Parrot, then led by Jean-Claude Margueron since 1979, have provided French archeology with his letters of nobility… and bequeathed to the Louvre outstanding collections. The problem is that by decorating the most prestigious museums in the world, the site is becoming increasingly impoverished. Abundant documentation, which has also been published, has been able to contemplate in another day the history of the third millennium B.C., a story believed to be confined to the low Euphrates. The discovery of Mari, and later that of Ebla much more recently, has made this view possible.Excavated searches by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs take place each year for six weeks, from mid-September to early November. At the moment, they aim to expose the palace of the third millennium, whose architecture, according to the archeologists responsible for labor, would be completely different from those of the palace of the millennium.If the cities were well born in Sumer, south of Mesopotamia, in the current millennium, their culture had to spread far beyond and enriched with non-suérious inputs. Inhabited by semites, Mari was ideally located at the crossroads of the influences of the coastal peoples, the Anatolia plateaux and Sumer.The Euphrates was then the axis of passage of goods from the Khabour, Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia.A large navigation canal (11 m wide, 120 km long) was discovered on the left bank of the river which facilitated navigation of boats in all seasons. Its construction was the source of Mari's creation. The city, built on the left bank of the river, owes its wealth to tolls levied on the goods in transit.Mari has long been considered as a half circle. By determining the ancient Euphrates course (which has never bathed the city) and analyzing the texts of clay tablets (which often speak of essential channels to cultures), archeologists have rediscovered what was the city's trunk. The conclusions were that, before 1979, only the western part of a circular city was discovered. The other half (low city versus the political and religious center searched) was separated by a canal. The port of Mari was identified north. The outer burreline, with a diameter of 1,900 m, played both a dam role against the river floods and a bulwark. This research, of a multidisciplinary nature, militates for an overall conception of the city, built during the first third of the third millennium.Several distinct periods mark Mari's history. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century B.C., the city, founded two centuries earlier, is experiencing intense activity and then abandoned. Another period is 2600-2500 BC (the presargonic period) at about 2200. The city would then have caved under Akkad's empire, after the reign of Sargon. The third period is the Shakkanakku dynasty (2266-1980 B.C.). A new royal remains is built. From the temporal space separating the end of the Shakkanakku dynasty from the arrival of the Amorrites, we know very little. A few names mark more deeply this period of amorrated dynasty succession (Iahdun-Lim, Shamshi-Adad, Iashmah-Addu, Zimri-Lim). It ends with the rise of Babylon and the city bag by Hammourabi (around 1800 BC).