Umm el-Marra

Umm el-Marra (also Oumm el-Marra and Tall Umm al-Marra), (), east of modern Aleppo in the Jabbul Plain of Aleppo Governorate Syria, was one of the ancient Near East's oldest cities, located on a crossroads of two trade routes northwest of Ebla, in a landscape that was much more fertile than it is today.

Tuba

It has been suggested that in the Late Bronze age the name of the site was Tuba (or Tupa) possibly mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions listing cities that were defeated or destroyed in the Pharaoh Thutmose III's north Syrian campaign. The city of Tuba is also mentioned

in epigraphic remains from Ebla, Mari, and Alalakh. In Ebla it is written as Dub or Tub. This suggestion is as yet unproven. One ruler, Sumi-rapa (son of a Yarlm-Lim), is known from a seal found at Alalakh.

He is thought to have been a contemporary of Alalakh ruler Niqmepa, a vassal of Mitanni. Two different translations of the seal have been proposed "Adad who appointed me, Sin(?) who loves my reign, Sumirapa, son of Iarim-Lim, king of Tuba, beloved of Istar, seal of seals " and "Adad who proclaimed my name, the .... who loves my reign: Sumi-rapa, son of Iarim-Lim, king of Tuba, beloved of Istar, seal of .... s". The seal iconography is "Winged sun disk hovering over a Syrian prince with tall oval headdress and draped garment with thickened borders being blessed by an Egyptian-type falcon-headed god and the Syrian goddess". It is known that "Istar of Tuba", and epithet pf the

goddess Ištar was worshiped at Tuba from texts found at Mari. Siptu, Queen

of Mari ruler Zimri-Lim made a sappum sacrifice to Istar of Tuba and on several

occasions made offerings to the lance, the divine weapon, of Ištar of Tuba.

Doubts have been raised about the identification os Umm el-Marra with Tuba, placing it

instead closer to Alalakh. Doubts have also been raised that the Tub or Dub in the Ebla texts refers to the

city of Tuba in question. The

other problem with identifying Umm el-Marra as Tuba is that Tuba had rulers and a god (Istar of Tuba) so there

had to be a palace and at least one temple and there have been no archaeological findings for

either one of those.

Excavation of Umm el-Marra was conducted at the site between 1978 and 1985 by a Belgian team led by Roland Tefnin. This team also worked at the nearby site of Tell Abou Dann.

From 1994 until 2010, a joint archaeological team from the Johns Hopkins University and

the University of Amsterdam led by Glenn M. Schwartz and Hans Curvers worked at Umm el-Marra.

Finds included a cuneiform tablet (UEM T1), recovered from the North Area near the city wall in a Late

Bronze age (Umm el-Marra period II) layer. The text is a contract document (release of a slave woman) "in the presence of Šuttarna, the king". Šuttarna (c. 1400-1380 BC) was ruler of the Mitanni empire. THe tablet

was sealed with the seal of an earlier Mitanni ruler Šauštatar. The paleography and syllabary

of the text is similar to texts from that period found at Tell Brak

3rd millennium tomb

A rare intact, unlooted tomb, ca. 2300 BC, uncovered by Dr. Schwartz's team in 2000 at the site, made science press headlines, for it contained five richly-adorned adults and three babies, some of whom were ornamented head-to-toe in gold and silver.

It may be the oldest intact possibly royal tomb yet to be found in Syria. Dr. Schwartz noted of peculiar aspects in the burial that they 'may hint at ritual characteristics, rather than a tomb simply reserved for royalty or elite individuals.' The interment, which was above ground in ancient times, included three layers of skeletons in wooden coffins lined with textiles. The top layer includes traces of two coffins, each containing a young woman in her twenties and a baby. The women were the most richly ornamented of all the occupants of the tomb, with jewelry of silver, gold and lapis lazuli. Also of interest on this level was an accompanying lump of iron, possibly from a meteorite. Geochemical analysis of the iron, based on the ratio of iron to nickel and cobalt, confirms that the iron was meteoritic in origin. One of the babies appeared to be wearing a bronze torque, or collar.

In the layer below were coffins of two adult males and the remains of a baby at some distance from both men, close to the entrance of the tomb. This differs from the placement of the babies in the upper layer, where they were placed next to the women's bodies. Crowning the older man was a silver diadem decorated with a disk bearing a rosette motif, while the man opposite had a bronze dagger. The third and lowest layer held an adult male with a silver cup and silver pins.

All the individuals were accompanied by scores of ceramic vessels, some of which contained animal bones that may have been part of funerary animal offerings. Outside the tomb to the south, against the tomb wall, was a jar containing the remains of a baby, a spouted jar, and two skulls, horselike but apparently belonging neither to horses or donkeys. These equids were subsequently identified as kunga, a hybrid of domestic donkey and wild ass. Two groups of three puppies were found (Installation B) and the skeleton of an adult dog (Installation C) was found between equids.

Incisions on four lightly baked fragmentary clay cylinders dated to c. 2350 BC have been hypothesized to be Early Alphabetic Semitic writing, which would make them the oldest such examples. Some of the fragments were joined to bame 4 partial cylinders (UMM04 O-3 a-d) and no further joins were possible. The find layer was dated to Early Bronze

IVA (c. 2350 BC) however there was an intrusive Late Bronze pit dug into that area of the tomb, which the excavators discounted.

References

External links

Is this the world's oldest alphabet? - Anna Thorpe - January 26, 2026
Johns Hopkins news release, May 9, 1994.
Johns Hopkins/University of Amsterdam Joint Expedition Umm el-Marra, Syria
Johns Hopkins expedition report

Tuba

3rd millennium tomb

See also

References

Further reading

External links