Idrimi

Statue of Idrimi in the British Museum.

Idrimi (meaning "It is my help"[1]) was the king of Alalakh c. 1490–1465 BC,[2] or around 1450 BC.[3] He is known, mainly, from an inscription on his statue found at Alalakh by Leonard Woolley in 1939.[4][5] According to that inscription, he was a son of Ilim-Ilimma I the king of Halab, now Aleppo, who would have been deposed by the new regional master, Barattarna, king of Mitanni. Idrimi would have succeeded in gaining the throne of Alalakh with the assistance of a group known as the Habiru,[6] founding the kingdom of Mukish as a vassal to the Mitanni state. He also invaded the Hittite territories to the north, resulting in a treaty with the country Kizzuwatna.

Jacob Lauinger considers Idrimi as a historical character, king of Alalakh around 1450 BC, in Late Bronze Age, but suggests his statue and inscriptions can be dated from c. 1400 to 1350 BC, and be related to a Mesopotamian pseudo-autobiography (called narû-literature), in which kings apparently leave records of their misadventures as a lesson for future generations. Lauinger also comments that the inscriptions try to legitimate the rule of Alalakh only by acknowledging the supremacy of Mitanni, and the text(s) may have had an audience coeval to politics of that time.[7]

  1. ^ Dossin, Georges (1939). "Nqmd et Niqme-Ḫad". Syria. Archéologie, Art et histoire. 20 (3): 176. doi:10.3406/syria.1939.4136.
  2. ^ Fink, Amir Sumaka'i, (2010). Late Bronze Age Tell Atchana (Alalakh): Stratigraphy, Chronology, History, BAR International Series 2120, Oxford, p. 2, Summary Table 1.
  3. ^ von Dassow, Eva, (2022). "Mittani and Its Empire", in Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, D. T. Potts (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, Volume III: From the Hyksos to the Late Second Millennium BC, Oxford University Press, p. 474: "...On archival and archaeological grounds, Niqmepa's reign may be dated roughly around 1425 BC, and his father Idrimi's roughly around 1450..."
  4. ^ Longman III, Tremper, (1991). Fictional Akkadian Autobiography: A Generic and Comparative Study, Eisenbraums, Winona Lake, Indiana, p. 60: "...discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1939...Although found in the debris of Level IB (ca. 1200 B.C.), the statue was dated by most scholars back to Level IV (ca. 1500 B.C.)..."
  5. ^ Freedman 1992, p. 382.
  6. ^ Freedman 1992, pp. 381–382.
  7. ^ Lauinger, Jacob, (2021). "Imperial and Local: Audience and Identity in the Idrimi Inscriptions", in Studia Orientalia Electronica, Vol. 9, No. 2, Finnish Oriental Society, pp. 31, 32.