Muškēnums in the Mari Texts: New Evidence

Abstract

The article provides a survey of new attestations of the Akkadian word muškēnum (lit. ‘the one who bows down’) in the corpus of cuneiform texts from Mari archives (18th century B.C.). These attestations come from the epistolary documents edited or re-edited in 2013–2023. As the examined evidence shows, the word muškēnum can appear in semantic oppositions which are already well known: muškēnum can be opposed to the state (“palace”), kings, high officials, nobles and tribal leaders. Sometimes people called muškēnum form a special group different from pasturalists (hanû) and from certain categories of peasants (dālû, lit. ‘water drawers’). There are contexts in which this word is used as a functional equivalent of an expression “citizens of (such-and-such) town”. With due caution one can say that the term muškēnum designated primarily free, independent inhabitants of cities and villages owning land outside of the state sector and summoned by the authorities to different duties. At the same time some muškēnums could be connected to the state more closely: they cultivated the palace land paying for it to the state. It is also necessary to note a nuance ‘ordinary person, commoner’ that is proper to the meaning of the word muškēnum: it emerged in the situations when there was a need to oppose a free simple person to someone of a higher rank endowed with power and influence, be it an official or a tribal leader.