Мушкенумы по данным текстов из архивов Мари

Вестник древней истории. 2012. № 2. С. 119–141.

Alexandrov B.

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’.

Keywords: социальная структура, social structure, История древнего Ближнего Востока, Древняя Сирия, Ancient Syria, history of the Ancient Near East, forms of dependency, формы зависимости