The Toponyms of Ebla I Nomi di luogo dei testi di Ebla (ARET I-IV, VII-X e altri documenti editi e inediti)

by Alfonso Archi; Paola Piacentini; Francesco Pomponio Review by: Michael C. Astour Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 117, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1997), pp. 332-338 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/605495 . Accessed: 18/04/2014 11:40
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THE TOPONYMS OF EBLA*

MICHAEL C. ASTOUR SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AT EDWARDSVILLE I Nomi di luogo...., when used in tandem with Marco Bonechi's I Nomi geografici dei testi di Ebla, provides the student of Eblean toponymy and topography with a valuable tool for the study of third-millennium Syria. Considerable scholarly caution, however, must still be exercised in the analysis of place names from this time and region.

the piecemeal publication, with laudable speed, of the tablets, in volumes of two series and in numerous articles, created problems for the toponymist. He did not have a general picture at his disposal; he had to search in several books and periodicals for every occurrence of a particular place name; his lists, files, and notes were subject to changes as new evidence became available; and he was not protected from omissions and errors of transliteration, especially in early publications. Now these difficulties have been, to a very great extent, remedied by the simultaneous publication of two independent works in the same field-the volume reviewed here, and Marco Bonechi, I nomi geografici dei testi di Ebla, Repertoires g6ographiques 12.1 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig * This is a review article of I Nomi di luogo dei testi di Ebla Reichert Verlag, 1993; hereafter, R6p. g6ogr. 12.1). I am not reviewing Bonechi's book, but I find it useful to start (ARETI-IV, VII-X e altri documenti editi e inediti). By ALFONSO ARCHI, PAOLA PIACENTINI, and FRANCESCO POMPONIO. by briefly comparing and contrasting the scope and orARCHEOLO- ganization of the two works. Archivi Reali di Ebla, Studi, II. Rome: MISSIONE First of all, neither of them is complete, i.e., not all GICA ITALIANA IN SIRIA / UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA Ebla tablets have been utilized in compiling the topo"LA SAPIENZA," 1993. Pp. 493 (paper). Abbreviations follow Ake Sjoberg, ed., The Sumerian Dictionary of the University nymic catalogues. This is regrettable, though I fully understand that, with limited personnel and resources, it Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. 1: A, part II takes time to transliterate, let alone hand-copy, every last (Philadelphia:The Babylonian Section of the University Musetablet at the disposal of the team of the Missione Archeum, 1994), vii-xxxix, with the following additions: ARAB = Daniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Asologica Italiana in Siria. ARES II (as the volume under review will be referred to henceforth) excerpts the tabsyria and Babylonia, vol. 1: Historical Records of lets published in ARET I-IV, VII-X, in MEE II and X Times to the Earliest (ChiSargon Assyria from that had not also appeared in the ARET volumes, and cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1926). those tablets published in separate articles, a list of which ARES = Archivi Reali di Ebla, Studi. is given on pp. 9-10. In addition, sixty-six unpublished = "Estratti di vocabulari" a shorter lexical series. EV "great annual reports of disbursements in silver" (their Cf. "VE." inventory numbers are listed on p. 15) were used in the Meriggi, Manuale = Piero Meriggi, Manuale di eteo gerocompilation. On the other hand, those entries in G. Petglifico, parte II: Testi-la serie, i testi neo-etei piu o tinato's catalogue of Ebla texts (MEE I) whose toponyms meno completi, Incunabula Graeca, vol. 14 (Rome: he cited, were left aside, unless they were published Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1967). elsewhere or coincided with some of the sixty-six "great = Signatureof tablets from Tall Mardib. TM = "Vocabulariodi Ebla"-a longer lexical series pubannual reports." The transliterations in MEE I, rapidly VE made from photographs, are not always reliable (as lished in MEE II. Cf. "EV." 332

THE ARCHIVES OF EBLA, besides providing other invaluable information on the society and culture of the earliest known state of northern Syria, contain an extraordinary number of its place names. The exact figure cannot be established for two reasons: not all of the Ebla tablets have been, so far, published or excerpted; and it is not always possible to be certain whether some assonant names are mere variants or represent different entities. Still, my earlier rough estimate ("Toponymy of Ebla and Ethnohistory of Northern Syria: A Preliminary Survey," JAOS 108 [1988]: 547, n. 15) of "perhaps... two thousand" seems to be not very far from reality. But

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ASTOUR: The Toponymsof Ebla shown, in some cases, by subsequentcollations), but they include a few interesting items, and it would have been worthwhile to check and process them. On the other hand, Bonechi used only the published material, but he also included a large number of the names in unpublished tablets as reported in MEE I, with the note "cit." and sometimes with the remark"to be collated."Thus, to an extent, the two works complement each other. Transliteration and printing errors that could be detected in previous publications have been corrected-in ARES II in the entries themselves, without special notice, in Rep. geogr. 12.1 in the entries and also in an appended list. In the second place (after somewhat different coverage), there is a difference in the format. Rep. geogr. 12.1 follows the general patternof that series: occurrences, in their various forms and spellings, are grouped undernormalized entries, which the compiler considers to be typical and which reflects his preferred phonetics. A long list of correspondencesbetween normalizedand syllabic writings is placed at the end of the volume. This method is called prescriptive or normative and is, by its nature, often subjective. Notes following the entries, wherever they are found, are in general shorter than in other volumes of Rep. geogr. and often provide no useful information, but they contain references to publications which deal, in one way or another, with Eblean places and their names.1ARES II, on the other hand, chose the descriptive method by listing separately every spelling or formative variant, however slight, and limiting the editor's interference to cross-references to other similar looking items (which also involves a degree of subjectivity). How this method works in practice will be discussed later in this review. The explanatorynotes to some of the entries are, in fact, detailed historical and geographical excursus. But all this does not touch upon the uniqueness of the conception and execution of ARES II, and it is the innovative characterof the work that calls for most attentive consideration. The leading idea, certainly to be credited to Alfonso Archi, was to provide the researcher in the virgin field of Eblaitica not only with a list of place names and their occurrences but also with guidelines and tools for comprehending the nature of Eblean toponymy and for ex-

333

of the History of EblaPart(1),"in EblaitMy "AnOutline

ica: Essays on the Ebla Archives and Eblaite Language, vol. 3,

ed. CyrusH. Gordon (Winona Lake,Ind.:Eisenbrauns, 1992), interalia,severallocations of cities 3-82, in whichI proposed, andtownsin thetheatre of warfare between EblaandMari,aptoo late to be notedin eitherbook. peared

tracting from the epigraphic data as much information as possible on the political, administrative, economic, cultic, and human conditions of as many settlements as possible in the orbit of Ebla. And so, the actual index of the toponyms is preceded,afterthe necessary technical remarks, by an introduction (pp. 15-29) of seven sections: (1) documentation;(2) literarytexts and the "list of geographicalnames"(excluded as originatingin southern Mesopotamia and irrelevant to the geography of Ebla); (3) graphic problems; (4) phonetic values; (5) case endings; (6) the suffixes; (7) toponyms and anthroponyms (a long list of place names which coincide, fully or at least significantly, with personal names found in Ebla texts). There follows a list of names of functions associated with toponyms and an index of toponyms by their consonantal skeletons, which facilitates finding different writings of the same name as well as cognate or assonant names. I shall returnpresently to some problems with the introduction. The principal part of the book-the catalogue of place names-differs in its construction from all other works in toponymy known to me. The items of information associated with the place names are grouped into six categories: (1) NP: personal names; (2) NF: names of function; (3) TA: administrative terms; (4) ND: divine names; (5) NG: geographical names; (6) C: other. Only the most frequently attested entries contain data from all of the five informative categories, the rest have some or none of them. But whichever of these are available, they are extremely useful. The prosopographicevidence of category (1) can lead to equating toponyms with divergent spellings if the same functionaryis associated with each spelling. It can also point to the approximate location of a site, as in the cases of land estates bequeathedto Tisa-Lim, queen of Imar.The data of category (2) can establish the political status of a city, e.g., whether it was a royal seat. But here one must be careful to distinguish between an actual local king and the king of Ebla (cf. Bonechi's investigation, "I 'Regni' dei testi degli archivi di Ebla,"Aula Orientalis 8 [1990]: 157-74). If, in the data of category (5), there is a visible pattern of association of the given site with one or more other localities, this too may be of geographical importance. Of course, this procedurerequires repeated quotations of the same passages in the same or several entries. I noticed a few technical slips which could have been avoided by more attentive editing: P. 214. Du-ni-ibki instead of Du-ni-ibki, as in the quoted text (ARET VII 10 ?8). This printing error is important,because it may lead to the erroneous assumption that we have here the only unambiguous spelling of

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334

Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.2 (1997) and geographical interpretationsof the collected material. As mentioned above, ARES II aims at being descriptive in character,but this is hardly possible. Already the choice of how to read the polyphones of the Eblaic script demands a personal decision. Structuralanalysis of toponyms also depends on one's premises. Historical geographyof the ancient Near East is a complicated discipline with plenty of leeway for conjecture. The following critical remarks are limited, by the requirementsof space, to only a few examples in each of these three areas of interpretation. Reading of homonyms(graphics). Of the polyphonic signs used in the writing of the Eblean toponyms, the most frequent are NE and NI. The Old Akkadian values of NE are (as listed by Gelb, MAD, 2: 74-75) bi/pi5, bil/pil, ne, lig (as indexed in ARES II), and de/te4. Of these, bil/pil does not seem to have been used in Eblean toponymy; lig is so read only in A-ga-ga-lig-iski, which is an orthographicvariantof A-ga-ga-li-iski; de is assumed in Lu-la-dekiand Li-li-deki (because of Lu-la-duki), I-lideki (because of Li-li-dcki), and Da-na-deki (because of

in the Ebla texts (in the presumedTu-ne-ebki, Tunip p. 212, the final eb/ib is a value of the more common tum). P. 227. Ga-gabaki appearstwice: in its alphabetically correct spot, with one occurrence noted, and again five entries later, with two. P. 251, s.v. Gu-nu-guki.The reference is to MEE X 3 rev. VII: 14'-17'. However, the toponym in that passage is actually Gi-nu-gi-nuki, which F Pomponio, "Adammaparedradi Rasap,"StudiEpigraficie Linguistici 10 (1993): 6, explained as reduplication (a form of plural) of Gu-nukilGu-nm ki, a well-attested Ebleancultic center of Rasap. Conversely, the occurrence of Gu-nu-gukiin ARET III 272 II: 2 is missing. One may guess that the two entries were telescoped, with the place name as in ARET III 272, and the reference to what should have been Gu-nu-gu-nukiin MEE X 3. P. 257. While eleven of the group of twelve cities in TM.75.G.1297 are duly registered in the appropriateentries, the twelfth one, Ha-la-NE-NIki (i.e., Ha-la-bi-iki), is missing. Its elimination, if justified by collation of the tablet, would have upset the curious patternwhich recurs in three more analogous lists. But as Prof. Archi informed me upon inquiry,it was omitted inadvertently. was introduced, P. 277. A separate entry Hu-ur5-duki following P. Mander's idiosyncratic transliteration in MEE X 2 rev. V: 5-6 (in fact, the value ur5 for HUR has not been attested in Eblaic and Old Akkadian writing). It should have been listed, in standardtransliteration, in the entry Hu-hur-dukion p. 272. P. 310, s.v. Ir-baxki,commentary.Tisa-Lim, extremely well known from numerous Ebla texts as the queen of Imar, is here called, by an inexplicable lapsus calami, queen of Ugarit. P. 329. The form Lu-ri-limki (ARET VIII 531 ?25), put into the computer from the transliteratedtext, does not exist. The photographclearly shows -lumki.
P. 438. At the end of the entry Sa-nab-zu-gumki, it is

said: "See Sa-na-rul2-gutki." These are two totally unrelated entities, both onomastically and geographically. P. 478, s.v. Za-hi-ra-anki.One and the same reference (to TM.75.G.2465 rev. XIV: 13) is repeated twice, once Mas-bar-duki, the with the cited place name transliterated other time Mas-bar-rdki,in which rd is simply another (and unnecessarily used) value of DU.
P. 486, s.vv. Zu-guki and Zu-gu-luk. The note following the latter entry says: "Zu-gtki and Zu-gu-luki are the

Da-na-daki). But the identity of Lu-la-NEkiwith Lu-ladukiis highly questionable;the readings Lu-la-bfki,Li-libki, and I-li-biki provide good equations with toponyms attested in subsequent periods; and too little is known about Da-na-NEki and Da-na-daki to regard the two as identical. This leaves us with the two most common values of NE in Old Akkadian and Eblaic: bi and ne. In ARES II, initial bi is found only in Bi-na-aski, the name of a prominentEblean cultic center, thus spelled because of the plausible identification of the site with medieval Binnis, modern Banis. In practically all the other names with NE in initial position, it is transliteratedby the conventional NE (lower case, i.e., phonetic, ne appearsonly in Ne-ba-ra-dukiand, probablyas a printingerror,in NeNE-duki). This is done even in cases when an initial bi is suggested by toponymic parallels, like Bi-irki for NEirki(cf. Bi-e-ri at Alalab VII, [B]i-i-ru in the Hittite treaty with Tunip), Bi-bi-tuki for Ne-NE-DUki (cf. Bbth in a Ugaritic serpent charm which also contains other place
names known from Ebla, and (d)Bi-bi-it-hi, a Hurrian

divine epithet formed from a toponym). NE in internal

position is rendered by bi in A-bi-ha-duki, A-bi-la-duki, A-bi-na-duki, and A-bi-ra-duki, by the uncommitted NE

same locality, for both of them are associated with the toponym A-bu-us-gki." A-b-us-giki is not a toponym but a personal name; it so appears, without the determinative KI, in the passages cited in the entries in question, and it is not listed as a toponym in the volume. Now we must turn to a more important and more controversialaspect of ARES II-its graphic,onomastic,

in most other names, including A-da-NE-gutki/A-da-NEigki and Zi-gi-NE-duki,though in the respective commentaries it is recognized, for the former (p. 96), that "the
reading A-da-bi-igki is suggested by A-da-bi-ikki, AIT,

p. 154," and, for the latter (p. 482), it is noted "Cf. uruSigi-bi-te in AT 185, 14," and, unaccountably,by the phonetic ne in A5-a-la-ne-gulki, A5-a-ne-gtiki, A5-a-ne-igki,

and As-a-ra-ne-gtiki, though all of these variants correof Alalah IV,as noted in ARET III: spond to UrUIa-ra-bi-ik

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ASTOUR: The Toponymsof Ebla 324, s.v. I-a-ra-bi-guki,and still is, albeit with a query, in ARES II: 16. This lack of consistency may be quite confusing for the user of the volume. The treatmentof the sign NI is even more confusing. Its Old Akkadian values are (according to Gelb, MAD, 2: 81-82) ni, if, i, and ia. The use of li in Eblaic writing is probable in the bilingual vocabulary (VE, nos. 731, 732, 648a), but its occurrence in the toponymy of Ebla is unproven. A new value for NI, restricted to Ebla, has been established as bux (in earlier editions) or bu16 (in ARES II). More recently, another new value for NI, transliterated'ax (in earlier editions) or 'a5 (in ARES II) has been deduced from the apparentinterchange of NI with a in a number of proper names and lexical terms, as well as from the correspondenceof the Eblaic preposition NI-na (i-na) and Akkadian a-na (see L. Milano, "NI = 'ax nel sillabario di Ebla,"StEb 7 [1984; actually 1988]: 213-25). This led to an almost total elimination of i in ARES II. The sole survivor is )-markill-ma-arki, and this, I suspect, only because it is too well attested with an unambiguous initial i in the documentation of the Middle Bronze Age. Some names that had earlier (e.g., in ARET III) been transliteratedwith an initial i have now been relegated to the incertitude of NI, including NI-ra-arki, though it clearly appears as I-ra-ar in a ritual text from Emar (Emar6, 378: 28). But most of the place names containing NI were transliterated according to a simple formula: if that sign stood in an initial position, it was renderedby 'a5; if in the middle, by bu16. Isn't this system a little too mechanical? The ARET III transliteration I-a-ra-bf-gluki agrees much better with urla-ra-bi-igki of Alalab IV than 'As-a-rane-guki; similarly, I-ga-arki/i-ga-ru12ki corresponds to
urI-ga-arki of Alalab VII, and I-'a-luki, to uruYa-a-[l]i in

335

entries of the bilingual vocabulary: VE 146 li-ba-tum/ li-bi-tum; VE 179 a-ba-lu-um/a-bf-lu-um; VE 660 asga-lum/is-ga-um; EV 012 ga-ba-ziu/gi-ba-su.Thus, without denying the possibility of NI = 9a5, one should also allow for the existence of differently vocalized but equally legitimate variants of many Eblean toponyms. bu16 as a value of NI at Ebla is certain, but here, too, caution is advised. If, instead of Ha-al-ma-bu16-umki, the name is read Ha-al6-ma-ni-umk, it would correspondto LU Hal-ma-nu-ka-a in the Emar text 118: 2, to the city Har-ma-na- in the hieroglyphic inscription from Carchemish (Meriggi, Manuale, 31 [no. 11, n. 2]), and to ShalmaneserIII'suruHal-man (erroneouslyidentifiedwith Halab [Aleppo] because of assonance and the presence of a temple of the storm-god in each of those cities). Also, La-la-bu16-umkishould preferably be transliteratedLala-i-umki. It occurs only in the letter of Enna-Dagan (TM.75.G.2367), in a passage describing Mariote military actions on the approaches to Imar. As I have indicated ("Outline of the History,"32-33 [with n. 195] and 37 [n. 226]), it corresponds,in all probability,to Bit-Lala-imkBit-sa-La-la-im k of the Mari tablets, and located in the same area. Structural analysis (onomastics). Introduction, ?3b (p. 17), deals with graphic omissions of /I/ in initial, medial, and final positions. In fact, this phenomenon takes place only with /1/ in medial, or, more precisely, intervocalic position. A computer-assembledlist of twelve toponymic pairs-with and without the initial /1/-opens the paragraph.But there are only three actual toponymic pairs in the list, i.e., textually confirmed alternatenames
of the same localities; La-da-i-nuki: I-da-i-nuki (and A-

da-i-nuki, cited above); La-ru12-ga-duki (Lrgt in a Ugaritic serpent charm) : A-ru12-ga-duki; and La-suki/La-zuki/ La-za-uki : A-suki/A-zuiki/A-za-umki. Of these, the third

a district transferredto the Kingdom of Ugarit from the Kingdom of Alalab. And even in cases when a place name occurs in two spellings-with either a- or NI- as the initial sign-must one necessarily make the latter spelling conform to the former?Of course, the presence
of A-la-la-huki along with NI-la-la-huki is a strong argu-

ment for giving NI the reading 'a5, but then one recalls that the Eblean A-ga-ga-li-is'k appears (as in ARES II:
100) as urUI-ga-ka-li-is/ruI-ka-ka-li in the res gestae of

Hattusilis I, and as I-ki-in-kal-i-is-sa (et var.) in the Hurro-Hittitebilingual, KBo XXXII 10-104. Moreover, the interchangea/i is found in Eblean names that doubtlessly belong to the same places and in which the vocalization of the relevant signs is unambiguous. Such are, e.g., La-da-ba4klLi-da-ba4 ki, Mar-nuki/Mi-ir-nuki,
Ma-lig-dukilMi-lig-du ki',Sa-gi-lu kiSi-gi-luki, A-da-i-nuki (MEE I, nos. 758a, 782)/1-da-i-nuki, Ag-da-ru12ki/Ig-

item is only half correct. As succinctly noted by Bonechi, Rep. g6ogr. 12.1: 66, there were two places bearing that name: one, a city on the Euphrateshaving relations with Mari (i.e., the royal client city excavated at Tell Hadidi), the other, an agricultural settlement under the direct rule of Ebla. To this one should add that only the latter had, in the period of the Ebla archives, an alternate appellation with an initial /1/, which became its sole name in the Alalab IV period (uruLa-as-si/La-si/La-as), while the city on the Euphrates retained in the Late Bronze Age (in its own tablets and those of Alalah IV and Emar)the name UrUA-zu/A-su. Two more instances of
the same pattern occur at Ebla: Li-ri-ib-zuki: I-ri-ib-zuki

darki, and Ab-sa-ri-igki/b-sa-ri-igki. Let me add a few examples of the same vocalic interchange in Eblaic

(not included because of the editors' avoidance of i), and La-ar-ma-luki, without an /l/-less counterpart at Ebla, but doubtlessly identical with Yrml(modem Armalah)in a district transferredto Ugarit from Alalah. But the presence or absence of initial /1/ in these toponyms is not

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336

Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.2 (1997)

connected with the elidable natureof Eblaic /1/. This alternation belongs to a category of Syro-Mesopotamian personal and geographical names prefixed with the asseverative or, less often, negative particle la- (before a or a consonant) or /- (before anothervowel). I have counted eight such toponyms in Syria, north Mesopotamia, and Babylonia of Middle and Late Bronze Ages. Some of them are attested without the initial particle (in the diferent text corpora, not necessarily attached to the same places), and all of them (including those occurring at Ebla), shornof the particle,representperfect lexical units. In the remaining items of the list, the electronically paired toponyms are not related to each other. Lu-rilumki,or perhaps Lu-ri-numki,a royal client city, probably located on the eastern periphery of the Ebla Empire, cannot be equated with Ug-ri-lumki (also called
Ur-luki/Ur-lumki/Ur-luki/Ur-lumki),

nasirpal II). The item Mu-ri-ig/guki (Mu-urki) merits a

somewhat longer remark, because here we have at our disposal a more specific and instructive set of geographical data from Eblean and extra-Ebleansources.
Mu-turkilMu-ru12ki/Mu:ru12ki, a rather important town

in which two, perhaps three, sons of the vizier Ibrium owned real estate, is repeatedly associated with A-sa-as/
suki (Alalab "ruA-za-zu-wa, Neo-Assyr. uruHa-za-zu, Old Aram. HZZ, med. CAzaz,mod. A'zaz); U-nu-biuki (Alalah uruUn-nu-ba, med. Innib in the CAzaz district, mod.

Anab or CAnab12 km southwest of ACzfz); 'A-maki

(Alalab ma-at A-ma-eki/uruA-ma-e, capital of a district

between ACzaz and Aleppo, perhaps mod. Tell Rifcat, Neo-Assyrian Arpad, the largest mound of the area);
Gu-r-is/su/zuki, a town of the DA-maki district (mod.

an agricultural settle-

ment from a frequently listed group of localities which, form the occurrencesof several of them in the records of Alalah IV (including uruU-ri-lu), Ugarit, the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Hamath, and in modern toponymy, can be assigned to a district southwest of the city of Ebla. In ki (andan exceptionalnumberof variantforms), Ld-da-ba4 the name of a city in the northerndistrict of Lu'atum, in the hierowhich was perpetuatedas La-ta-pa-tiURBS in the same Hittite of Jekkeh area, the inscription glyphic initial /1l is part of the stem. The insufficiency of relying on the computer for grouping toponyms according to their structurecan also be illustrated by a few examples from Introduction, ?6d (p. 23), dealing with the suffixes -aG(u), -iG(u), and -uG(u). The formative -g- is genuine, and in "Toponymy of Ebla," 552-53, I called attention to its presence in other Semitic toponymies. But it is not a suffix in all place names listed in that paragraph:in some of them it is part of the etymological stem, as in Biuzu-gaki (Emar: uru'kiBu-uz-qa) "sown field" (cf. Bezeq

Garis, 9.5 km east of ACzfz), which, for its part, is associated with Lu5-a-timki, capital of a district north of ACzaz,and with Sa-na-ru12-guki, one of the towns of that district. Mu-ru12kiitself is also associated with U-lulu-ba4ki, probably the same as U-la-la-bu6-umki in the Lu'atum district and UrUU-[l]u-ba in the kingdom of

Carchemish at the time of Ashurnasirpal II, when it stretchedwestward up to, and into, the former district of LuDatum.A definite pattern emerges from these links, which suggests for Muru a location in the Aczaz area. Now ShalmaneserIII, after a foray across the Amanus into lowland Cilicia in 834 B.C., recorded in his annals
(ARAB, 1: 207, ?582): "On my return, urUMu-u-ru, a

Judg. 1:4-5; I Sam. 11:8, and cognates in modern Syrian toponymy); Da-mi-guki /damiqu/ "pleasant,prosperous"; Mar-ma-guki /marmaku/ "bathing place" (Akk.
narmaku); Mu-lu-guki / muluk(k)u/ "(royal) property" (cf. I-lu-um-Mu-lu-ukki at Mari, and uruMu-lu-uk-ku at

royal city (i.e., district capital) of Arame, son of Agusi (the king of Arpad), I seized as a strongholdfor myself; I strengthenedits thresholds, I built therein a palace for my royal abode."The city must have stood on the northern borderof the kingdom of Arpadin orderto be seized and annexed by Shalmaneser III on his way from the Amanus to the Euphrates, and must have been a major site to qualify as a fortified district capital, first of Arpad, then of the Assyrian Empire. A mound that satisfies these requirementsis Tell Tabil, 7.5 km north-northeast of ACzfz, west of the road to Gaziantap,where it forms the boundarybetween Syria and Turkey.
On the other hand, Mu-r'-igki/Mu-ri-gUlki appears in

Ugarit, neither of which can be equated with the Eblean town); Mu-zi-giki/Mu-zu-guki/Mu-zu-guki/muziqu/ "raisin" (Akk. muziqu/munztqu/munziqqu; now also attested

as mu-zu-qi-ma at Mari, see B. Lion, "Vignes au royaume de Mari,"in Memoirede N.A.B.U., vol. 1, ed. JeanMarie Durand [Paris: SEPOA, 1992], 112), identical near Carchemish (Meriggi, Manuwith Mu-zi-ki-aURBS ale, no. 22: 5; with corrected readings established by J. D. Hawkins, A. Morpurgo-Davies, and G. Neumann), cf. kurMun-zi-ga-ni near Carchemish (annals of Ashur-

quite-differentcontexts. In two lists of land holdings of Napbaya, a son of Ibrium, diverging in length and arrangement(TM.75.G. 1444 ?14, published by D. O. Edzard, "Der Text TM.75.G.1444 aus Ebla,"StEb 4 [1981]: 40-41, and ARET VII, 152), Mu-ri-ig/gtk' opens an almost identical enumerationof eight to ten localities, all but two of which, from their recurrencesin texts of subsequent periods, can be placed in the southwestern part of the Ebla domain. The town in question is listed as Mu4-ri-qa in Thutmose III's Naharina List, no. 349. There still exists, 27 km north of Hama by the highway

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The Toponymsof Ebla ASTOUR: to Aleppo, a sizable rural town between two large mounds, the name of which was noted Marik or Marek on maps and in topographicalstudies, now standardized as Murak.There can be little doubt that this site, located in an area in which the survival of ancient toponyms is relatively frequent, corresponds to Mu-ri-ig/guki. Geographical information. In some cases, the editors attempted to identify toponyms with place names in other sources, and to provide the reader with relevant cross-references in the appropriate entries. This wellintended endeavor was, however, implemented in a fragmentary and poorly organized fashion. After correctly stating (p. 16) that "the major continuity occurs in the areaof Ugaritand, above all, at Alalab,"it is said, without reservations or qualifications:"The toponyms for which " equivalents are found in the texts of Alalab are ... followed by twenty place names. With one dubious exception, the equations are correct; it is their numberthat is not. According to the tabulation of my file of Eblean toponyms in other sources, 145 of them are mentioned in texts of Alalab VII and Alalab IV (counting those that occur in both periods as one). Even if we round that figure down to 140, it will still be seven times larger than the one given in ARES II. The toponymic materialfrom Ugaritfaredeven worse. Only eleven Eblean place names are listed as allegedly "attestedin the archives of Ugarit." The Ugaritian items are cited under the relevant entries, and their examination shows that (with the sole exception of the already mentioned Lrgt) the two sets do not match. Besides, not eleven but fifty place names reasonably identifiable(onomastically and geographically) with Eblean ones occur in tablets excavated at Ras Shamra and originating at Ugarit itself, plus fifteen more in texts found at the same site but written in Hittite centers of power (Hattusas, Carchemish, and Alalah). Not all of these place names belonged to cities and towns of the Kingdom of Ugarit, and several of those that can safely be assigned to that kingdom recur in the texts of Alalab. This is quite normal, because a study of Ugaritiantopography shows that all places with Eblean toponymic parallels were located in the northern and eastern districts transferredto Ugarit from the Kingdom of Mukis-Alalah in the fourteenth century. Conversely, none of the localities of the original territory of Ugarit, including its capital, appearsin the Ebla texts. The editors try indeed to save Ugarit for the geographical horizon of Ebla by mentioned in three identifying it with U-gu-ra-du/tumki, Eblean texts-a view not shared by all students of Ebla. The scanty documentationon Ugurat(u)shows that it was a settlement under the direct rule of an Eblean lugal (district governor) and was apparentlylocated in, or near, the EuphratesValley. Whateverthe materialcondition of the

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contemporaneouscity of Ugarit, it would have been mentioned at Ebla in quite a different fashion, comparableat least to the references to Eblean client states. I suggested ("Outline of the History," 68) a simple explanation for the absence of Ugarit (and other western and southern sites) from the texts of Ebla. The greatly reduced figures for the occurrences of Eblean place names in records of Alalab and Ugarit, and their failure to appear at all in other ancient sources (Ur III, Mari, Hatti, Emar, Assyria, and the especially abundantEgyptian topographic lists and historical records) mislead the user of ARES II as to the actual degree of toponymic continuity in ancient northernSyria. He may also be disoriented by some of the equations which are based solely on (often remote) assonances and which ignore the geographical reality of the corresponding places. What is, for instance, the point in claiming that Sa-ra-mu-nukiand Sa-ma-nu-guki should be identified with, respectively, the Ugaritian trmn and smngy (pp. 16 and 422, and already A. Archi, "Notes on Eblaite Geography II," StEb 4 [1981]: 2). Leaving aside that trmn (misprinted trmn on p. 422) in the title of King Niqmaddu "II" is in all probability not a place name at all, and that the third,damaged, sign of "Sa-ma-nu-guki," tentatively read rna'? in the original publication and on p. 437, should be read du on the basis of TM.75.G.1442 rev. VI: 21-23, published by M. G. Biga and F. Pomponio, "Criteres de r6daction comptable et chronologie relative des textes d'Ebla,"MARI7 (1993): 124-25, and not utilized in ARES II-there is a more crucial objection. Trmn (if it were a toponym) and Smngy/uruSam-

ni-ga of the Mountain District belonged to the Kingdom of Ugarit, while Sa-ra-mu-nukiand Sa-ma-rdug-guki are listed among the fifty-two settlements of the district of Lu'atum. It was none other than Archi who, by his felicitous identificationof anotherof those settlements, Zi-riKUB XIX 27 IV 12, a border baki, with "URUZi-ri-pa, of the of Karkemis city region during the Hittite age," provided the clue which allowed me to identify a few other places of the district in question and to situate it in the upperbasin of the Quwaiq River (Michael C. Astour, "The Geographical and Political Structure of the Ebla Empire," in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft von Ebla, ed. H. Waetzoldtand H. Hauptmann[Heidelberg:Heidelberg Orientverlag, 1988], 143 with n. 29). At its greatest expanse, the Kingdom of Ugarit did not directly abut even the southernpart of the Hittite kingdom of Carchemish, let alone its northernmostpart. I must abstain from citing some other casual and inconsistent statements of this kind. In conclusion, ARES II is an excellent reference work which will be greatly appreciatedby students, not only of

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338

Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.2 (1997) are not always the only or the best ones. It would also be advisable, when reading the commentaries dealing with geography and comparative toponymy, to have before one's eyes a map of the northernparts of Syria and Mesopotamia.

the toponymy of Ebla, but also of its prosopography and sociopolitical conditions. But in using the work they should keep in mind that the computer is very useful for arranging the input in any desirable sequence, but that its analysis must still be done in the old-fashioned way, and that the transliterations chosen by the editors

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