Qatna

About Qatna in brief

Qatna was an ancient city located in Homs Governorate, Syria. It was an important center through most of the second millennium BC and in the first half of the first millennium BC. It contained one of the largest royal palaces of Bronze Age Syria and an intact royal tomb that has provided a great amount of archaeological evidence on the funerary habits of that period. The city’s religion was complex and based on many cults in which ancestor worship played an important role. Qatna’s location in the middle of the Near East trade networks helped it achieve wealth and prosperity. It traded with regions as far away as the Baltic and Afghanistan. The name is Semitic; it derives from the root q-ṭ-n, meaning “thin” or “narrow” in a number of Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Syriac, and Ethiopian. The toponym is strictly related to waterways and lakes; this could be a reference to the artificial narrowing that created a lake from the springs located southwest of the city, since Q atna grew on the eastern shore of a now dried-up lake. The site has been excavated since the 1920s and is located in the countryside, 18 km north of Homs. Three flowing tributary wadis cross the Ores River, enclosing an area of 19km north–south and enclosing the central wadi at least 20km east–west, surrounded by at least twenty settlements. The wad is now dry, but most of their discharge is disproportional to the size of their valleys, suggesting that the region was much more humid and abundant in the past in the early Bronze Age.

In the 19th century AD, the site was populated by villagers who were evacuated into the newly built village of al-Mishrifeh in 1982. It became a circular city in the Early Bronze Age, dating to the early phases of the Bronze Age IV, and became the upper city of Qatni in the later phases of this phase. It is located on a limestone plateau, and its extensive remains suggest fertile surroundings with abundant water, which is the case in modern times. The area surrounding QatNA was fertile, with abundantWater, which made the lands suitable for grazing and supported a large population that contributed to the prosperity of theCity. Q atni was destroyed by the Assyrians in 720 BC, which reduced it to a small village that eventually disappeared in the 6th century BC. The Amorites, who established the kingdom, followed by the Arameans; Hurrians became part of the society in the 15th Century BC and influenced Qatn’s written language. The earliest occurrence of the name comes from the Middle Bronze Age archive of Mari, where the city is mentioned as ‘Qatanum’ The name Qatanum was used in the Amorite format that was shortened into ‘Qa-ta-na’ in the Late Bronze Age during the Late Age.