It is not something that happens every day, discovering biographies of real people from 3,500 years ago, which is why the statue of King Idrimi is still today one of the most important finds in history.
The phrase is from James Fraser, one of the curators of the Middle East department of the British Museum, where the sculpture is kept and where it has not left in the last 80 years.
It was discovered in 1939 by archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who is considered the first modern archaeologist and is remembered, among other things, for having found geological evidence of the Gilgamesh flood and for working together with T. E. Lawrence (the famous Lawrence of Arabia) on the excavations of the Hittite city of Carchemish.
It appeared in the ruins of a temple annex in Alalakh, in southern Turkey and near Antioch, a city founded in the 2nd millennium BC. in a strategic location halfway between Aleppo and the coast.
Alalakh was sacked by the Hittites around the 16th century BC. but it returned to live a time of splendor between the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC. under a local dynasty, to which King Idrimi belonged.
The effigy of the king, carved in magnesite and about 104 centimeters high, represents him seated on his throne. The eyebrows, eyelids and pupils are inlaid with glass and black stone, and the head is covered with a kind of crown or round cap.
But what is really interesting about the figure is the inscription in Akkadian that covers a good part of his body, and which consists of a 104-line biography of Idrimi, something certainly unusual in archaeological finds of the period. For this reason, it is considered one of the most significant discoveries of cuneiform writing.
It recounts how Idrimi had to flee to Yamkhad (name of the Amorite kingdom of Aleppo in paleo-Babylonian times), and then to Emar (present-day Tell Meskene, Syria), the birthplace of his maternal family, possibly fleeing from the Hittites. .
Determined to restore the reign of his dynasty in Alalakh, he traveled to Canaan in search of the help of the king of the Umman-Manda, a group of peoples of difficult identification that according to the context are associated with the Hurrians, Elamites, Medes, Cimeres and even Scythians, but whose origin is still a mystery to historians. There he lived for seven years, while raising troops for his cause.
He eventually enlists the help of the Habiru, a group of semi-nomadic people settled in the Fertile Crescent from Canaan to Persia, described in the sources as occasional mercenaries. He will return with a great army and, supported by Parsatatar, the Hurrian king of Mitanni, recovers the throne of Alalakh although as his vassal, reigning for thirty years.
The inscription ends with curses for all those who desecrate or destroy the statue.
Specialists have dated the image to between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 15th century BC, which presents problems and has sparked a long academic debate on the matter. In fact, according to the reports from the time when it was found, it is deduced that it appeared in an archaeological level dated several centuries after the period in which Idrimi lived, around 1250-1200 BC
One of the explanations that some archaeologists have suggested is that the scribe Sharruwa, whose name appears at the end of the inscription, would have made it in that last period due to political reasons, and not commissioned by Idrimi as stated in the text.
However, the historicity of Idrimi and the events narrated are confirmed by two tablets that appeared in the Alalakh excavations, this time at the level corresponding to the fifteenth century BC, one of them containing the royal seal of the king.
Idrimi's life has been compared by some historians with those of Abraham, David, Moses and other biblical characters, all of them sharing similarities and avatars:all of them were refugees or exiles in their youth, they undertook a journey in search of the favor of the divinity and based their subsequent success and authority on it.
Now the British Museum has proceeded to digitize the statuette, making it accessible for the first time to the public online through a 3D model. Its fragility has been the reason that during all this time it has not been loaned to any other museum. Even specialists have had to study the inscription using old photographs and transcripts.
At the same time, a 1:1 scale reproduction has been created that will be exhibited in Syria from the summer of 2018.
Recommended book
Ancient History of the Near East:Mesopotamia and Egypt (Joaquín Sanmartín and José Miguel Serrano).