Abstract
When the Émar site was discovered in 1972, specialists hoped to discover the city mentioned in the Mari sources in the Amorite period, and thus document a new major Middle Bronze urban center on the Euphrates. However, after six excavation campaigns, it became clear that the bulk of the excavated archives belonged not to the Middle Bronze Age, but to the Late Bronze Age, more precisely to a period largely corresponding to Hittite domination of the city. This chronological revision profoundly renewed Émar's place in historiography, making the city an essential site for the study of the Late Bronze Age. On the other hand, several centuries of its history remain largely inaccessible today, having been submerged under the waters of the artificial lake of el-Assad. This situation raises the question of what the rich documentation of the Late Bronze Age suggests about the city of Émar, and what the study of the written culture of other major Middle Bronze Age urban centers, such as Mari, suggests about the evolution of Émar between the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages. To this end, this paper proposes first to examine historiographical expectations and the archaeological realities of the site, then to analyze Late Bronze written culture at Émar, and finally to reflect on the continuities, ruptures and hypotheses that can be formulated for the Middle Bronze, bearing in mind the limitations and biases of the sources.
