Mari was built, destroyed and rebuilt three times on the Euphrates
A mound on the Euphrates near today's Abu Kamal hides a city that rose and fell repeatedly for over a thousand years. Dug up from 1933, Mari yielded more than 25,000 clay tablets revealing Bronze Age diplomacy and trade routes stretching from Afghanistan to Crete.
Mari was founded around 2900 BC as a planned settlement meant to control river traffic between Sumer in the south and the Levant to the west. Its builders set it 1 to 2 kilometres back from the Euphrates to escape floods and linked it to the water with a canal of 7 to 10 kilometres whose course is still unknown. A thick circular rampart with towers protected the core. For reasons nobody has explained, this first city was abandoned around 2550 BC.
Before 2500 BC it was reborn with a fresh street grid sloping from the high centre to the gates so rainwater drained away. This second Mari, Semitic in speech yet steeped in Sumerian culture, built a royal palace that doubled as a temple and several smaller shrines, including ones to Ishtar and Shamash. Its kings fought a long war with the rival city of Ebla. A letter from King Enna-Dagan around 2350 BC boasts of predecessors' conquests, though scholars still argue over how to read it. Ebla was first destroyed around 2300 BC, and roughly a decade later Sargon of Akkad burned Mari in turn.
Mari lay empty for two generations until the Akkadian king Manishtushu restored it under a military governor titled Shakkanakku. The post became hereditary, starting with Ididish, said to have ruled for 60 years. When Akkad fell apart the governors ran the city independently, sometimes calling themselves kings in inscriptions while using the humbler title with the court of Ur.
In the second millennium BC the Amorites spread across the Fertile Crescent, and around 1830 BC Mari became the seat of the Lim dynasty under Yaggid-Lim. That last flowering was short: Babylonia destroyed the city around 1761 BC. A small settlement lingered under Babylonian and Assyrian control before Mari was forgotten altogether in the Hellenistic period, until its rediscovery transformed the map of ancient Syria and Mesopotamia.
Source: Mari, Syria
