A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law

ANATOLIA AND THE LEVANT

ALALAKH

Ignacio Márquez Rowe

Alalakh, modern Tell Atchana, lies on the direct road between Aleppo

and the Mediterranean, in the Amuq plain, which today occupies

the major part of the Turkish province of the Hatay.

The seven seasons of excavations at Tell Atchana that Sir Leonard

Woolley conducted in 1937–39 and 1946–49 yielded over five hun-

dred cuneiform tablets, most of them written in Akkadian.

The majority of the tablets come from two royal archives unearthed

at two distinct levels and belong accordingly to two different his-

torical periods. The older archive, which includes about 35 percent

of the excavated texts, was discovered in the Level VII palace and

is dated to the late Old Babylonian period. More than half of the

Alalakh written material was found in the more recent archive, in

the Level IV palace and fortress, which is dated to the fifteenth

century.^1

A. A LVII

1. Sources of Law

1.1 The sources of the period under discussion (in historical terms,

late Old Babylonian; in archaeological terms, late Middle Bronze

Age) extend from the installation of Yarim-Lim as ruler of Alalakh

by his elder brother Abban, Great King of Yamkhad (Aleppo), to the

destruction of the town, presumably by the Hittite king Hattusili I.

1.2 The extant corpus of legal documents from Alalakh VII in-

cludes about ten documents that are concerned with litigation, one

693

(^1) The basic edition of the texts remains Wiseman’s The Alalakh Tablets. It should
be noted that a few tablets are still unpublished or only partially published; see the
provisional list in Hess, “A Preliminary List...”
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