About the conferece
Of all the great empires of the Ancient Near East, the Mittani Empire is the most enigmatic one: for almost two centuries it was one of the leading great powers, rivalling the New Kingdom of Egypt, Babylonia, and the Hittite Empire for supremacy. Culturally, it exerted an influence on the Hittite Empire that should not be underestimated, serving as a transmitter of Mesopotamian culture to Anatolia. In its heyday, the empire stretched from the Mediterranean to the Zagros, thus encompassing parts of the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Considering that, it is even more astonishing that very little is still known about the Mittani Empire. Neither is its list of kings complete and reconstructible without uncertainties, nor are the residences and great temples of their capitals known. Larger archives from the core area are missing, as are monumental products of a courtly art. In part, this may be due to the fact that so far, the major capitals of the empire have been insufficiently archaeologically investigated. However, it cannot be ruled out that other reasons are responsible for the apparent lack of monumental art.
Our knowledge of Mittani history and culture has long been based almost exclusively on the rich results of excavations in two peripheral cities of the empire: Alalaḫ in the west and Nuzi in the east. It was only in the years before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war that research began in the centres of the empire located in the Ḫābūr region. Unfortunately, these were abruptly interrupted, and a resumption seems unlikely in the long term. Nevertheless, the results, some of which have not yet been published, give us cause to re-evaluate the history, structure, and culture of the Mittani Empire, taking into consideration not only the material from the Mittanian heartland but also from its periphery to the north and east, which is now available due to recent excavations.
To reach the goal, a 2-day symposium in Bern on the subject of Mittani: an Enigmatic Empire (21st-23rd October 2022) is planned with a view to publishing the papers as a monograph in Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis (OBO).
The symposium is intended to provide a small group of invited speakers with the opportunity to meet face to face and discuss a variety of relevant themes, some of which could be updated, others of which still lack consensus, and a few of which have yet to be considered in relation to the political entity that is Mittani. We have scheduled fourteen presentations each consisting of a 30-minute synthesis of research followed by a 15-minute discussion. The aim of the symposium and resulting publication is to provide a Handbook that surveys the scattered material (textual, archaeological, art historical, palaeobotanical etc.) on the Mittanian and early Middle Assyrian period, re-examines the evidence considering new discoveries, and presents the pros and cons on issues that remain open to debate. The volume is aimed at students and academics interested in the formation of one of the first tentative empires and international alliances that reshaped the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world during the Late Bronze Age.
