Emar

Listen first. Wind moves across a low, pale plateau. Below you, the water of Lake Assad laps at the shore with a soft, steady sound. The ground underfoot is dry and crumbly. It is a mix of chalky earth, broken pottery, and the dust of mud brick. At first it looks like empty land. But you are standing on the remains of a city that people knew more than three thousand years ago. Its name was Emar.

Emar sits on the right bank of the Euphrates, upstream and to the west of Tabqa. Archaeologists call the place Tell Meskene. A tell is a mound made by many layers of human settlement, one on top of another. Here, those layers cover thousands of years. The landscape around you looks quiet today. In the Bronze Age, this bend of the river was busy. Boats, donkey caravans, and merchants passed through on their way between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast.

The name Emar is very old. It appears in the clay archives of other ancient cities in Syria, including Ebla and Mari. Scribes there mention Emar as a trading partner on the river. So, long before the ruins you see now, people already knew this town by name. Its position gave it value. Whoever controlled Emar could watch the river traffic, and could take a share of everything that moved along it.

The ruins on this plateau mostly belong to the Late Bronze Age. That is roughly the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries before Christ. At that time, Emar lived under the power of the Hittites. The Hittites were an empire based in what is now central Turkey. They ruled Emar through a regional viceroy at Carchemish, further up the Euphrates. Emar kept its own local king and its own council of elders. But the real authority sat with the Hittite administration.

Here is the first surprise. Many scholars believe the Late Bronze city was planned and built as a new town, not simply grown over time. The builders shaped the slope into terraces. Houses and temples rose on these steps, and they looked down over the river valley. As you walk, notice how the ground rises in levels. Those gentle steps are not only natural. Some of them follow the lines that ancient builders cut into this hillside.

Why do we know so much about this place? The answer is the water in front of you. In the 1970s, the Tabqa Dam created Lake Assad. Engineers knew the rising lake would cover many ancient sites along the river. So archaeologists from many countries came for a race against time. At Emar, a French team led by Jean-Claude Margueron dug from 1972 to the mid-1970s. They had to work fast, before the water arrived.

That rescue work produced a remarkable result. The team found many hundreds of clay tablets in the houses and temples. Most were written in Akkadian, the shared written language of the ancient Near East. Some contained Hittite and Hurrian words as well. The tablets were wedge-shaped writing, called cuneiform, pressed into wet clay with a reed. When the city burned, fire baked many of those tablets hard. In a strange way, the disaster helped them survive.

The tablets give us something rare — the daily life of ordinary people. There are contracts for buying houses. There are wills, loans, adoptions, and records of debts. One family might sell a field. Another might free a slave, or name a daughter as heir. When you look at the scattered stones here, try to picture those families. They argued over property and planned for their children, much as families do today.

Now the second surprise. Emar had a large household of a diviner. A diviner was a religious expert who read signs from the gods. Archaeologists found a big collection of texts in this building. It included ritual instructions, word lists for training scribes, and copies of famous Mesopotamian literature. So this small river town was also a place of learning. Young scribes sat here and copied texts that came from far away in Babylonia.

The ritual texts describe the town's festivals in detail. One describes how the community chose a high priestess for the storm god. Another describes a festival called the zukrum, a major celebration held over several days. Processions moved through the town and out beyond the city gate. Animals were offered, and the people shared food and drink. These texts let us hear the rhythm of a festival that ended more than three thousand years ago.

Emar's end came suddenly. In the early twelfth century before Christ, the city was destroyed. This happened during a wider period of collapse across the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Great powers, including the Hittite empire, fell apart in these decades. At Emar, the destruction left a burned layer in the ground. Later, other towns rose nearby. In Roman times there was a settlement called Barbalissos, and in the medieval Islamic period there was a town called Balis.

The story of the site did not end with the first excavation. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a joint Syrian and German team returned to study the parts of Emar that stayed above the water. In more recent years, during the conflict in Syria, reports described illegal digging at many sites in this region. Emar was among the places affected. So the holes and disturbed earth you may notice carry two stories. Some come from science, and some come from loss.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and face the lake. Somewhere under that calm surface lie parts of the river valley that Emar's people farmed and crossed. Look at the pale stones near your feet, and at the shapes of old walls in the ground. As you walk back, listen again to the wind and the water. They are the same sounds the scribes of Emar heard, while they pressed their reeds into the clay.