dead man; 1 near the Dead Sea, a Beduin was looking for a stray sheep. 2 In all three cases, the additions to our knowledge were revolutionary in their effect. Ugarit proved to be the site of an ancient city which had flourished for four thousand years, and had been the centre of fertile cultural exchange between the Near East and the Mediterranean islands; hundreds of texts, new in language and in script, revealed the beliefs and mythology of the peoples who preceded the Hebrews in Palestine and Syria. 3 Mari disclosed another city of like antiquity, the centre of a state which in its heyday had held sway over a great part of northern Mesopo- tamia. Its diplomatic archives, containing over 20,000 documents -- still in course of publication -- are leading to a rewriting of the history of Western Asia in the first half of the second millennium B.C., 4 and they have revolutionized our chronology by advancing our dates for ancient Western Asia by about two centuries. 5 The Dead Sea Scrolls are older by several centuries than the earliest
Cf. the account in A. Parrot, Mari, une ville perdue . . . , Paris 1945. Information on the pre-war excavations is given by C.-F. Jean, Six campagnes de fouilles é Mari 1933-1939. Synthése des résultats, Tournai-Paris1952. Reports of subsequent excavations are published from time to time in Syria.
Cf. R. de Langhe, Les textes de Ras Shamra-Ugarit et leurs rapports avec le milieu biblique de l'Ancien Testament, 2 vols., Paris-Gembloux 1945; C. F.-A. Schaeffer , Ugaritica I-III, Paris 1939-56.
The edition and translation of the Mari texts is being carried out by G. Dossin, C.-F. Jean, J. R. Kupper, and J. Bottéro, with the title Archives royales de Mari; so far they have published eight volumes of the cuneiform text ( Paris 1941-57) and seven of transliteration and translation ( Paris 1950-7); also a Répertoire analytique des tomes I-V has been issued by J. Bottéro and A. Finet ( Paris 1954). A fine photographic documentation is provided in A. Parrot, Mari. Documentation photographique de la mission archéologique de Mari, Neuchétel-Paris 1953.
Other factors, too, have contributed to the determination of the new chronology, principally the new list of the Assyrian kings found at Khorsa- bad: cf. P. van der Meer, The Chronology of Ancient Western Asia and Egypt, ed. 2, Leiden 1955. The present book follows the so-called 'short' chronology, whereby Hammurabi is dated 1728-1686 and other dates are adjusted accordingly. It must be noted, however, that the system which puts back the dating by 64 years ( Hammurabi 1792- 1750) also has consider- able probability or even more. Cf. lastly in favour of the 'long' chronology A. Goetze, "On the Chronology of the Second Millennium B.C.", in Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 11 ( 1957), pp. 53-61, 63-73 (this article came to my notice too late for use in the present book).
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Publication Information: Book Title: The Face of the Ancient Orient: A Panorama of Near Eastern Civilizations in Pre-Classical Times. Contributors: Sabatino Moscati - author. Publisher: Quadrangle Books. Place of Publication: Chicago. Publication Year: 1960. Page Number: 4.
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