Mari

In the heart of the Syrian desert, just off the western flank of the Middle Euphrates about twelve kilometers from the Iraqi border, stands one of the most important, yet least known, of the archaeological sites in Mesopotamia.

And while modern access, on a paved highway from nearby Deir Ezzor, is well populated by desert villages and grazing flocks, Mari, or Tel Hariri, early in the twentieth century was remote and virtually inaccessible, so was discovered, as often happens in archaeology, by pure chance.

It would seem that in the heat of May, in1933, a French officer on his way through Syria was stopped by a young shepherd in the desert, who said he needed an informed opinion. The officer, exhausted from the long journey, was only too glad to dismount, to rest and water his horse.

The young man, however, insisted that the officer look at his find. He had just stumbled across an unusual statue, carved of the local crystallized gypsum, as he turned over the more ordinary stones with which to cover a grave.

The statue appeared to be old, said the young man, and the officer noticed that despite the absence of a head, it was very beautiful. His curiosity aroused, the officer notified the authorities in the Department of Antiquities and Archaeology in Deir Ezzor, then as now the provincial capital of Syria's northeastern Jezira province, in the Khabur-Euphrates watershed.

A commission was immediately dispatched to the site, an evidently manmade hill, in effect a "tel" -archaeological remains on elevated topography-- in the desert; and with only a minimum of effort further artifacts came to light. Sections of mud-brick wall, more gypsum statues in ceremonial dress, votive offerings, as well as an inscription that identified one figure in particular as a representation of King Lamgi Mari, thus confirming that the disorderly stones and fragments of construction, now strewn across Tel Hariri, were in fact bits and pieces that might provide a clue to the legendary Mesopotamian stronghold of Mari, whose whereabouts, despite its importance and unique circumstances, had for decades confounded both archaeologists and historians.

It would seem that Mari, perhaps by 2900 B.C., had grown from a village to a more ambitious settlement, surely because of its strategic location, thus offered the possibilities for the construction of a new city. The site, in effect, came to control the trade lanes between western Iran and central and southern Mesopotamia, with Carchemish and the fertile Syrian steppes to the north in Anatolia - now part of Turkey-and throughout the Khabur-Euphrates river system. The embankments farther to the south offered additional protection for the caravans bringing their goods to the merchants of Tadmor (later Palmyra), Halab (Aleppo), Qatna, the Emesa (Homs)-Tripoli gap, on to Byblos in the west and Damascus, to the southwest. By the Bronze Age this cargo had grown from dried fruits and dates, olives and their oil, pottery and porcelain, textiles and grains to include the tin so indispensable for bronze casting, brought overland from India and Malaya, two of the few places in the world where tin naturally occurs, so the city, as a protection against bandits, random nomads and rival tradesmen, had to be fortified, and with this gave rise to the military sector that would forever after form a part of its society.

By this time Mari had become as well a center of art and culture, which extended to the demands of an assortment of cults and temples. And with this came a parallel political power, since the city, now stable and firmly established, was the core of the dominant hegemony in the Middle Euphrates, controlling trade all the way down to Balikh, on the Persian Gulf. To a degree this dominion was owed to the efficient administration of a vast and effective irrigation system, with a network of canals that not only guaranteed the best use of farmland and permanent pasturage for the camel trains and flocks of goats and sheep, but also the transport by water of trade goods.

At the time Mari was discovered Syria was under French mandate. This permitted the assigning of the project to the already celebrated André Parrot, a seasoned archaeologist experienced in Mesopotamian architecture, who managed to direct the exhaustive excavations until 1974. During those years Mari's secrets, though still obscure, and often in counter position to the fieldwork and research of other teams operating in the area, little by little came to light. A Semitic people, it appears, had adopted the Sumerian culture, but recreated it according to their own dictates, with a peculiar grace, subtlety, and completely personal artistic vision. Samples of this style are on exhibit in the National Museum in Damascus, the National Museum in Aleppo, the exceptional archaeological museum in Deir Ezzor, as well as the Louvre in Paris. After 1978 work came under the direction of French anthropologist Jean-Claude Margueron.

Mari's impact on the history of Mesopotamia probably began with the construction of the first palace complex, between c. 2700 and 2600 B.C., with its thick adobe walls, cisterns and possibly the first temple, later, in subsequent construction phases, consecrated to Ishtar.

The Great Temple of Dagan, deity of storms and the heavens, was then added as part of the palace complex and by around 2500 B.C. had become the nucleus of a cult that attracted not only local worshipers but also pilgrims from the surrounding countryside, up and down the river. The kings of Akkad (Northern Mesopotamia) attributed their success to Dagan, so fashioned great bronze lions to represent them at the temple doorway; and by the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur his cult had become the official state religion. He was the principal deity in Ebla, in western Syria, by 2300 B.C. and his cult was carried to Ugarit, on the Mediterranean coast, by around 1300 B.C. There he was venerated as the father of Baal, the second most important deity after the Supreme God "El". In time Dagan, himself, was also venerated as a principal deity, especially by the Philistines, ancestors of the Palestinians.

Mari saw another period of ascendancy between c. 2340 and 2150 B.C., during the reign of Sargon II of Akkad, when the king used the city as the base for his campaign of expansion. His domination was short-lived, but he left as a legacy the cult of Shamash, the remains of whose temple were uncovered near the "Maison Rouge", a knoll of rust-red earth adjacent to the current palace excavations, possibly the location of the original temple-pyramid -the ziggurat-that according to legend existed in Mari before the period of palace architecture.

Shamash is an Akkadian word meaning "Sun", transliterated by the Assyrians and Babylonians as the Sun God. His temple in Mari possibly predates Sargon himself, given the analogy with the sun goddess Shapash in Ugarit. The inference is that Shamash was initially a female deity, then was later presented as male through association with the solar deity Utu of Sumeria, implicitly an emblem of authority and consistent, by then, with the dictates of conquest, expansion and domination of neighboring peoples.

Shamash was believed to know everything, see everything, understand everything, and in addition he accompanied travelers on their journeys, to keep them safe from harm or evil. The cylinder seals of the time show him standing in a great portal between two huge doors which are wide open, though guarded by gatekeepers. These doors are presumably to be found between the twin peaks of Mount Mashu, and according to the legend of Gilgamesh are the Eastern Doors to Heaven.

Shamash's attribute is a saw. With it he can prune a tree as easily as split open a mountain. Metaphorically, his saw dispels intransigence and irrelevance, thus permitting sensible decisions, and with this he is interpreted as a God of Wisdom and Justice. He punishes wrongdoers, bestows happiness on "those deserving of it" and controls the seasons of the year. His cult in Mari, according to evidence unearthed in Ghuzana (Tel Halaf), Ebla (Tel Mardikh), and others of the area's many sites, gave the city great importance.

By around 2000 B.C. the population suddenly swelled as a result of the arrival in Mari of a confederation of tribes called the Amorites -perhaps from the Indus Valley-on their way west. Their name, in effect, in the local dialect meant "west". About 1900 B.C. those of their population already settled in nearby Tel Ashara (Terqa), about sixty kilometers to the north, managed to definitively subdue Mari, thus establishing a relatively stable hegemony with ironclad control over the trade in copper and tin that passed through Persia and over the Euphrates, some one hundred and fifty years before the legendary palace-builder Zimri-Lim -also Amorite but from another tribe-ascended the throne. As it happened, before being invested with the command of Mari, Zimri-Lim was shrewd enough to have taken refuge in Aleppo, and only returned to Mari on the occasion of the death of his rival, the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I.

The Amorites, among others of their settlements, ultimately established a colony on the Mediterranean coast. They had finally arrived as far west as they could go. The site was centered around a mysterious cult in Amrit, with its temple -a design allusion, in fact, to the island temple in Amritsar in the Punjab from whence a number of their clans might once have emanated-and, according to the evidence and artifacts in the archaeological museum in Tartus (Tortosa), eventually incorporated Phoenicians from the offshore settlement at the island of Arwad.

Mari thus attested to a parade of migrations, among them bedouins seeking agricultural or pasture land, armies in search of booty, and merchant caravans in search of markets. According to André Parrot, even the patriarchs Terah and Abraham passed through Mari on their way from Ur to Harran.

The center of the city came to be defined by its formidable outer walls, and a moat, nearly two kilometers across, fed by the great blue-green Euphrates, that protected the vast complex of palaces and temples, harem, baths, administrative offices, audience halls, banquet halls, storerooms, kitchens and baking ovens, royal apartments, elite residential areas, guest quarters, artisan quarters, the library, archives and study centers. Though construction had actually begun in the Third Millennium it was often modified, by a succession of rulers whose thread has perhaps been lost. Yet the ruins of a temple to the deified king Ninni-Zaza verify an exalted royal lineage. And by the time Zimri-Lim, the last king, ascended the throne the palace had been expanded to include three hundred rooms on two levels covering twenty-five thousand square meters, as well as at least two courtyards open to the sky, their walls as tall as five or six meters, decorated with mural painting that documented the investiture of kings and the taking of slaves, along with a highly refined sculpture, and architectural mannerisms that still defy description so have yet to find their place in the world history of art.

Zimri-Lim's spectacular palace was apparently destroyed, and in fact, according to the descriptions left on the cuneiform tablets of the time, practically leveled, by the Babylonian king Hamurabi, in 1750 B.C. Yet damage was such that the great walls fell in on themselves, were covered by the desert, and survived, despite the passage of time and the harshness of the climate, until Parrot's arrival in 1933.

According to the archaeologist, the palace represents the oldest and most complete example ever discovered of Mesopotamian architecture. The supports for the second floor somehow managed to survive so with this a number of doorways remained miraculously intact. Remnants of kitchen equipment were found as they had been abandoned, with scraps of cheese or bread still on the floor, and containers for olive oil or water, and clay utensils. Classrooms still revealed signs that the royal children had studied there. An archive concealed sixteen hundred separate tablets describing the king's accounting and finances. The library, probably one of the most complete ever unearthed, contained an astonishing twenty thousand tablets, a record as orderly as it was extensive, for it documents the history and dynasties of a region that stretched from Persia to Palestine.

The mud brick walls were burned a golden brown and many wooden beams, also burned, confirmed the various assaults on the complex, and the attempts to destroy Zimri-Lim's kingdom even before the definitive battle. Even so, bits of mural painting remain, with their geometric motifs combined with pictorial elements such as trees and flowers inside fantastic landscapes with real or imaginary animals, or the narrative that describes the gatherings of deities, ceremonies, sacrifices, the whole set off with decorative elements like the clay medallions whose various designs were determined by molds, also found intact and erroneously termed by a number of sources as molds for bread.

Offerings were found on the altars of the temples, or in the tombs, as elsewhere in Syria: bits of silk, wool or cotton cloth preserved thanks to the dryness of the desert. Statuary, ritual pottery, jewelry, votive offerings, all managed to survive Hamurabi's onslaught. Even the eroded and rounded remains of the pre-Sargon quarter, with its Akkadian ruins, can still be determined.

Excavations in the Temple of Ishtar verify the successive periods of construction. The temple's upper level, which corresponds to that destroyed by Hamurabi, refers to the Third Dynasty of Ur, but beneath it lie the ruins of a pre-Sargonite temple presumably destroyed by Eannadu, King of Lagash, in 2850 B.C. The third temple consisted of a single hall, surrounded by a patio with a portico and six columns. The fourth temple, built before 3000 B.C. and consecrated to a "virile goddess", revealed a number of votive figurines, cylinder seals, and spikes to hold the stone blocks of the foundations in place. Despite the looting of centuries, vandalism and the destruction or mutilation of the sculptures in the name of one or another faith, the temples, especially Ishtar's, represent cults with great religious impact over the widest range and diversity of societies, and the longest period of time. Yet for all its superimposition of cults and structures, after the last, vindictive Babylonian campaign, Mari's splendor finally faded and was never revived.

Though briefly and unsuccessfully occupied by soldiers of fortune from the neighboring kingdom of Khana, with their capital in Terqa (antecedent of the later, Hellenistic city of Doura Europos to the north), Mari was eventually reduced to a village and squalor replaced splendor. There was no more grandeur, no more study or innovation in art or learning. No one was curious enough to scratch around the palace in search of the remains of a glorious past, that archaeology would later uncover, like the bronze lions from the entrance to the Temple of Dagan, crushed under the debris. Idols from the Period of the Princes (Shakkanakku), those governors of a foreign power with their palace on the temple mount, vanished under the fallen walls. The ripe fertility goddesses, the solemn priests in attitudes of piety, the kings, public officials, effigies, in stone, alabaster, gypsum, fresco, like the facts and the dates and the names on all the tablets attributed to the library of the last king, even the posture of the dead in their tombs, had to wait until the mid-twentieth century in order to reveal something of the lives and the customs of the people who inhabited the three hundred rooms, yet their legacy is richly evoked in curious relics.

From the eighteenth century before Christ is the figure identified with the governor Ishtup-Ilum, with his Assyrian beard and Chinese style robes. From the same period is a fertility goddess, later identified with Artemisa and her cult in Ephesus.

Allegorical or mythological is the "eagle with the head of a lion", of lapis lazuli, gold, bitumen and copper, dated around 2500 B.C. It was used as a pendant and was associated with the cult of Anzu, of the Sumerian deity Ningirsu, from the city of Lagash.

There is the girl, dating from the Third Millennium, perhaps a priestess, known as "the songstress", one of Mari's most famous finds. Her typical skirt, or kaunaké, was confected of tufts of goat hair, stylized by the anonymous artist. She sits cross-legged on an enigmatic throne or bench, scored on one side, with scales on the other. Her hands no longer exist but the broken remains indicate she held them, in ritual piety, clutched at her breast. Her elbows, in the typically Sumerian style, are thin and pointed.

Of a related period, c. 2600 to 2350 B.C., is the seated figure of a woman sculpted from crystallized gypsum. She is possibly a representation of Ishtar --in fact, she was found in Ishtar's temple-and she sits enveloped by her burgeoning kaunaké. Her elaborate hairstyle and long shawl, actually a tapestry also confected of tufts of goat hair, are symbolic of her rank. The bench on which she sits is inscribed with royal insignia.

The priestly Ur-Nanshe appeared in many forms, and is to be found in a number of museums. His representations are solemn, imbued with dignity, yet somehow the endearing contours of the body, inside the outrageous kaunaké, the pointed elbows, the strong chin, the enigmatic half-smile, give him an immediacy unlikely in art from so remote a period.

A votive figure from the temple of Ninni-Zaza, c. 2600 to 2350 B.C., with his voluminous kaunaké, long beard, the stylized eyebrows and the black outline around shell-and-jet eyes -curiously similar to the eyes on the moai of Easter Island-- bears an inscription, attributed to Shibum, or Shamagan, King of Mari, praising the personage of the elusive god-king known as Ninni-Zaza, and with it, confirming the grandeur and the majesty of the mysterious Mesopotamian kingdom, now ruined and bare, but that shimmered then from the pinnacle that overlooked its canals, by the winding blue-green river: "He who contemplates a Land-Without-End, governed by the King of the World; it is he who humbly extends this offering to the divine Ninni-Zaza".

* Carol Miller is a sculptress and writer, devoted to her avid research of ancient cultures, from Mexico where she lives, or along her travels throughout the world. "Mari" is a chapter from a forthcoming book, soon to be available at Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Among her titles are "The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl", with Guadalupe Rivera Marin, a study in comparative mythology; and "Travels in the Maya World", "The Other Side of Yesterday, the China-Maya Connection" and "Training Juan Domingo: Mexico and Me", exerpts of which can be viewed at http://www.xlibris.com/CarolMiller.html