Territorial administration in Alalah during Level IV

Since they were first catalogued by Wiseman (1953), 1 the two corpora of tablets unearthed at Alalaḫ/Tell Açana, in the Amuq plain, one deriving from the 17th century b.c. (level VII) and the other from the15th century (level IV), have proven to be among the richest in the 2nd millennium Near East in terms of economic, political, social and demographic information. The sequence of such remarkable archives in the same place, in two relatively close periods, offers a rare occasion to observe how different political formations, in different historical contexts, built their networks of interaction within approximately the same geographical space. The territorial organization of Alalaḫ’s domain in the context of level VII has been the subject of many studies, based on both epigraphic and archaeological evidence, while, for the period of level IV, this issue has been mainly addressed by focusing on the recent archaeological data acquired under the purview of the Amuq Valley Regional Project. 2 Starting from a coherent archival group, the present paper proposes a new interpretation of some documentary sources on the territorial organization of the kingdom of Alalaḫ during the period of level IV, by providing evidence for an administrative subdivision of the state. These results will then be compared with the situation attested in level VII, viewed through the filter of previous scholarly work.