Article
Хеттское царство и страны Верхней Месопотамии в правление Тудхалии IV и его сыновей (2-я половина XIII — начало XII в. до н. э.): новые гипотезы и источники
The text TS 2 unearthed at Tell Sakka, some 12 km north of Damascus, and published by J.-M. Durand and F. Abdallah in the present volume, is of significant import for the reconstruction of historical geography and political history of the Late Bronze age Syria. It records a legal transaction taking place in the city of Ugulzat. The character of the transaction, a real estate transfer, makes probable the identification of the find place, Tell Sakka, as ancient Ugulzat. Apart from the newly found Tell Sakka text, Ugulzat is mentioned in various sources dating to the Middle and Late Bronze age period. The city plays a prominent role in Hittite religious and historical records, including the description of the famous One Year War fought by the king Suppiluliuma I against the Mitannian supremacy in Syria (CTH 51.I). Another important attestation of Ugulzat comes from recently published texts from Qaṭna. This evidence, however, didn’t allow a precise localisation of the toponym. The identification of Ugulzat with modern Tell Sakka brings about important additions to the current historical reconstruction. It confirms a vast territorial sway of Nuhašše lands which was already surmised by Assyriologists. It also lends support to the traditional view on Suppiluliuma’s Syrian campaign of the One Year War which presumes the Hittite advance up to the Damascus region, supposedly designated as Abina in the text of CTH 51.I. The installation of Takip-šarri on the throne of Ugulzat (CTH 51.I.A: 39–40) may be regarded as one of its episodes.
The question of the meaning of the term in the Old Babylonian Mesopotamia has a long history
and remains under discussion. The texts from Mari are of great importance for the studies on this
term, as they provide a great number of its occurrences (approximately 130 in 100 documents).
The materials from Mari do not support a view that muškēnum denotes tenants of crown land.
In most cases it is a designation of common citizens belonging to the communities as opposed
to the state sector of socio-economic structure. The use of the term to qualify the dependant low
rank personnel of the palace is quite rare. Since originally the word muškēnum had semantics of
submission and dependence, even high-ranking persons can be called muškēnum when opposed
to the king as supreme ruler of the land. The article has two supplements. The fi rst one provides
references to the attestations of the word muškēnum in the Mari corpus. The second one focuses
on the analysis of its orthographic variants (with cuneiform signs UŠ and UŠ in the second
position). One may note a relatively high percentаge of occurrences with UŠsign, which was
probably pronounced /us/. This leads to a discussion on possible reinterpretation of the word in
Mari Akkadian where it may have been also connected with the root SKN ‘to dwell’.
The article offers a historical and philological discussion of a fragment of a Hittite letter found at Hattusa / Boghazkoei. The document is argued to date back to the middle of the 13th century BCE and belong to the Hittite-Assyrian correspondence.