This article considers the administrative changes that occurred in the city of Emar in the early 13th century BCE—including the beginning of the now well-known bifurcation in scribal practices between the Conventional Middle Euphrates Format (also known as the “Syrian” system) and the Free Format (also known as the “Syro-Hittite” system)—in the context of international political currents. In order to position my understanding of Emarite history with respect to the ongoing chronology debate, I offer new chronological considerations using internal data from the Emarite legal documents that affirm the substantial overlap of the two scribal systems at Emar (most recently argued for by Daniel Fleming and Sophie Démare-Lafont), while also adjusting the dating of some important synchronisms. Following the establishment of the chronological position, the article poses the question of why the material changes at Emar were executed by the Hittite empire exactly when they were, despite a previous policy of non-intervention. I argue that the increasing threat posed by expansionist activity of the Middle Assyrian state to Hittite hegemony over the Syrian territories—of which Emar was the farthest south-easterly border state—is a contributing factor to administrative changes in Emar.

Stemming from the author's doctoral dissertation (University of Chicago, 2018), this volume illuminates the origins of the Late Bronze Age (LB) polity of Ugarit, especially as it emerged from the civilizational changes at the start of Middle Bronze. Buck argues that Late Bronze Age Ugarit originated as one of several Amorite kingdoms that diffused in Syria in the second millennium BCE.Chapter 1 surveys theories of Ugarit's origins, focusing on the competing hypotheses that it derives from a Canaanite or Amorite background. To contribute to the debate, Buck proposes a historical linguistic approach to assess the filiation of LB Ugaritic alongside archaeological comparison to contextualize Ugaritic material culture among other, roughly contemporary, assemblages. She details the background to the (re-)emergence of Ugarit after the Early Bronze Age (EB) in chapter 2, with a history of scholarship on the question of middle bronze age re-urbanization, favouring a hybrid model of exogenous and endogenous explanations. She also reviews the debate on the linguistic classification of Ugaritic, establishing her commitment to the use of shared innovations alone for linguistic subgrouping, which requires attention also to historical circumstance. Chapter 3 continues the introductory material by defining the terms "Canaanite", "Amorite", and "Ugaritic", briefly tracing their ancient usage and circumscribing their geographical boundaries. "Canaan" in LB documents was treated as a political entity with a well-defined territory distinct from Ugarit. "Canaanite" was not used as an ethnic term among peoples of Canaan, in contrast to "Amorite", which is defined by a kin-based affiliation known in the MB Syrian kingdoms of Mari, Qaṭna, and Yamḫad. Here, Buck also elaborates on the linguistic corpora, emphasizing that our knowledge of Amorite derives entirely from personal names. She proposes advancing our understanding of Amorite and its relevance to classifying Ugaritic by seeking to differentiate a western dialect of Amorite, confining her study to Amorite names attested in MB Yamḫad and Qaṭna, yielding a corpus of approximately 850 names deriving primarily from Tuttul and Alalaḫ. This evidence comprises a "language group" that Buck calls "Western Amorite".In chapters 4 and 5, Buck shifts from background to analysis. Chapter 4 aims to determine whether any other material assemblages resemble that of MBIIb-LBI Ugarit. Buck isolates five features ("fortifications, palace organizational system, migdāl temple construction, glyptic evidence, and . . . the ritual use of donkeys" (p. 117)) and maps their distribution. Only Alalaḫ shares all five features; Mari, Ebla, Qaṭna, Hazor, and Megiddo attest four. Buck argues that these overlaps are best explained by migrationmost likely of Amorites, since some comparable sites have explicit Amorite identity, some Ugaritic myths may allude to Amorite heritage, and (anticipating the next chapter) the Ugaritic language demonstrates affinity with Amorite.

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