The Lost City of Mari: The History and Legacy of an Ancient Mesopotamian Power Center

For a period of just under 100 years, the city of Mari in northern Mesopotamia-eastern Syria was one of the most, if not the most, important cities in the Near East. Mari was ruled by a dynasty of powerful Amorite kings who were not afraid to use their military power to keep subordinate provinces in line and their enemies at bay, but more often, they relied upon a combination of diplomacy and trade to establish their dominance. Founded by semi-nomadic Amorite tribes, Mari was gradually transformed over the span of centuries from a sleepy stop along the Euphrates River to the premier power in Near East during the early 2nd millennium BCE. It remained a relatively obscure city for quite some time, overshadowed by more powerful dynasties and city-states in Akkad and Ur until its kings took advantage of the collapse of the Ur III Dynasty and the return to the process of competing city-states that so often marked interregnum periods throughout ancient Mesopotamian history. If it were not for some very fortunate events and circumstances, the modern world might never have known about Mari.

After Mari was conquered by Babylonian King Hammurabi, its cultural and political influence quickly diminished until it was literally relegated to being a backwater on the Euphrates. As time went on, later rulers ignored the site, and it was eventually all but forgotten, so when modern scholars began deciphering and studying the enigmatic cuneiform script in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they noticed that though the city of Mari was mentioned in numerous important texts, no one knew where it was nor how big it was.