PRESENTATION

The ancient Mesopotamian city of Emar was located on the great bend of the Euphrates river in the Northwest of contemporary Syria, approximately 100 km east of Aleppo. The city was called Barbalissos in Byzantine times and Balis in the Islamic period. Although the place was known from cuneiform sources, especially from references in the palace archives of Ebla and Mari, it was due to French excavations led by Jean-Claude Margueron between 1972 and 1976 that the city could be identified and the “Emar studies” were founded. The French mission excavated several temples and houses from the Late Bronze Age and discovered nearly 900 cuneiform tablets, most of them written in Akkadian. Their publication by Daniel Arnaud in the mid-eighties of the past century aroused a great interest not only among Assyriologists but also among Biblical scholars. Since then, the publications associated with Emar have been constantly increasing.

Moreover, a Syrian-German mission led by Uwe Finkbeiner resumed the excavations at the site in 1996 and reached older levels of occupation, dating from the Early and Middle Bronze Age. Facing the increasing number of publications dedicated to Emar and the new archaeological work, the Institut für Altorientalistik of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo in Zaragoza, represented by Betina Faist and Juan-Pablo Vita, started a common project with the aim of facilitating and supporting the research of the Emar corpus. To this purpose, a number of tools are in the course of development while keeping a close contact to the Syrian-German excavation team. The first result of the project is a bibliography as complete as possible, which is here at disposal of any interested person.

The bibliography is presented here in two forms: on the one hand, arranged by subjects, so that the same title may be found in various sections, and on the other hand, arranged alphabetically by authors.
The bibliography, including the corresponding reviews, will be updated regularly and the new titles will be published every two years in Ugarit Forschungen, where the first edition has already appeared (Betina I. Faist, Josué-Javier Justel, Juan-Pablo Vita, “Bibliografía de los estudios de Emar”, UF 35, 2003 [published 2004], 191-230). Therefore, we will be very grateful to everyone who informs us of any omitted reference or of a publication not easily available to Assyriologists. The information can be sent to any of the following e-mail addresses: bfaist@zedat.fu-berlin.de jpvita@ieiop.csic.es jjjustel@ieiop.csic.es.