About the mātum in Early Second Millennium Middle Euphrates Region. The Royal Inscriptions of Yahdun-Lîm

Abstract

The Mari archives show the conspicuous presence of social groups committed to a mobile way of life in early second millennium Syria, but these never constituted an element foreign to settled farmers in the river valleys. If taken as different populations, one should recognize anyways that they were only ideal vectors that came from the same social milieu. In tune with this overall view of landscape, modern scholarship no longer assigns tribal characteristics exclusively to mobile groups, but instead understands a tribal socio political mode as a manner of resolving tensions in societies with signi cant mobile pastoralist components. Hence, apparently different social groups belonged to the same political entities and owed allegiance to the same authorities. The question now arises as to whether distinct cultural identities springing from the same socio-political soil need to be explained by the correlated existence of a single political unit encompassing them all (kingship) or we can see alternative ways of establishing social ties across distance. In early settings where expansionary kingship projects were still absent in the Middle Euphrates region, tribal identities seem to have offered an alternative or rather a complement to local urban citizenship, as we know from earliest Mari royal inscriptions. The matum category is used there for the first time to refer to socio-political entities on their own, not necessarily subordinate to larger polities.This work discusses the precise meaning of this term as used in the royal inscriptions of Yahdun-Lim.