Sumur in Amarna letters of Rib-Addi

by Damien F. Mackey “Velikovsky called this Rib-Addi king of Gubla and Sumur (var. Sumura) … which EA cities he had tried to equate with Ahab’s chief cities of, respectively, Jezreel and Samaria; though they are usually identified with the coastal cities of Byblos (Gebal) and Simyra”. What Sumur was not Sumur cannot realistically have been Samaria, as Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky had hopefully argued (Ages in Chaos, I, 1952). For, as I explained in my postgraduate thesis (2007, Volume One, pp. 83-87): …. Now EA’s [El Amarna’s] Lab’ayu, whom I shall be identifying with Ahab of Israel (c. 874-853 BC, conventional dates), appropriately straddles both part of Amenhotep III’s reign and the early part of Akhnaton’s. Velikovsky, for his part, had … looked to identify Ahab with Rib-Addi of Gubla, the most prolific Syro-Palestine correspondent to the EA pharaohs (over 50 letters in number). And this was surely a big mistake. For, in order for him to ‘make’ Ahab, like Rib-Addi, a very old man at death, Velikovsky was prepared to fly in the face of the biblical data and completely re-cast the chronology of Ahab’s life. He had convinced himself that there existed a contradiction between the accounts of Ahab in Kings and Chronicles so that, as he claimed, Ahab did not die at the battle of Ramoth-gilead as is stated in 1 Kings 22 (cf. vv. 6, 29 & 37), but rather reigned on for a further 8-10 years. Thus, according to Velikovsky’s view, king Jehoram of Israel (c. 853-841 BC, conventional dates), never truly existed, but was a ghost. From a biblical point of view, the fact that Rib-Addi had been able to report the death of Abdi-Ashirta (Velikovsky’s Ben-Hadad I) meant that Velikovsky was quite wrong in identifying Rib-Addi with king Ahab; since Ahab’s death preceded that of Ben-Hadad (cf. 1 Kings 22:40 & 2 Kings 8:15). But this was Velikovsky in his favourite rôle as “the arbiter of history”, according to Sieff, forcing historical data to fit a pre-conceived idea. Velikovsky called this Rib-Addi king of Gubla and Sumur (var. Sumura), which EA cities he had tried to equate with Ahab’s chief cities of, respectively, Jezreel and Samaria; though they are usually identified with the coastal cities of Byblos (Gebal) and Simyra. …. Velikovsky greatly confused the issue of Ahab of Israel for those coming after him, since Rib-Addi was chronologically and geographically unsuitable for Ahab. Revisionists have since rightly rejected this part of Velikovsky’s EA reconstruction, with Sieff suggesting instead that Rib-Addi may have been Jehoram of Israel. Liel favours this view from the perspective of her linguistic name studies. She has analysed the EA name, Rib-Addi, in the context of Israel’s Divided Monarchy … and has come to the same conclusion as had Sieff, assisted by James, but in her case on name basis alone: …. problematical to the Rib-Addi = Jehoram of Israel theory though are the geographical difficulties, as Liel now admits: Certain questions remain regarding the identification of the Rib-Yauram [Rib-Addi] of the Amarna letters and the biblical Jehoram son of Omri. The main one is geographical; i.e., can Sumur and Gubla be identified with Samaria and Jezreel? This question will be dealt with in a forthcoming paper to be entitled “The Hebrew-Phoenician-Aramean Kingdom of North Israel.” … whether Jehoram could feasibly have been the aged Rib-Addi is another consideration. Whether or not Rib-Addi turns out to be Jehoram of Israel, a far better EA candidate for Ahab than Rib-Addi, in my opinion, and indeed a more obvious one – and I am quite surprised that no one has yet taken it up – is Lab’ayu, known to have been a king of the Shechem region, which is very close to Samaria (only 9 km SE distant); especially given my quote earlier (p. 54) from Cook that the geopolitical situation at this time in the “(north) [was akin to that of the] Israelites of a later [sic] time”. Lab’ayu is never actually identified in the EA letters as king of either Samaria or of Shechem. Nevertheless, Aharoni has designated Lab’ayu as “King of Shechem” in his description of the geo-political situation in Palestine during the EA period (Aharoni, of course, is a conventional scholar writing of a period he thinks must have been well pre-monarchical): In the hill country there were only a few political centres, and each of these ruled over a fairly extensive area. In all the hill country of Judah and Ephraim we hear only of Jerusalem and Shechem with possible allusions to Beth-Horon and Manahath, towns within the realm of Jerusalem’s king. ... Apparently the kings of Jerusalem and Shechem dominated, to all practical purposes, the entire central hill country at that time. The territory controlled by Labayu, King of Shechem, was especially large in contrast to the small Canaanite principalities round about. Only one letter refers to Shechem itself, and we get the impression that this is not simply a royal Canaanite city but rather an extensive kingdom with Shechem as its capital. Against all objections already discussed, this description sounds very much to me like the distinct northern and southern realms during the split kingdom era! Note, too, how the more northerly region of Galilee is missing from this description. We might recall that Ben-Hadad I and/or Tab-rimmon had taken these towns from Israel’s king Baasha. De Vaux considered Aharoni’s identification of Shechem as the capital of Lab’ayu’s kingdom as being by no means certain: Lab’ayu was not, however, given the title of king of Shechem and it is very doubtful whether he ever was. It would seem too that he did not live at Shechem; his authority was probably exercised from elsewhere by means of an agreement made with the inhabitants. The latter took care of the internal administration of the city and recognised Lab’ayu’s authority as a kind of protectorate…. In the light of this, the conclusion of Rohl and Newgrosh is valid: “In most scholarly works Labayu is referred to as the king or ruler of Shechem and this, we feel, has been misleading”. Neither is Lab’ayu, as I already have noted, ever specifically mentioned in EA as a ruler of Samaria. However, given the close proximity of Shechem to Samaria - and given the apparently “extensive” rule of Lab’ayu - then he stands, in a revised context, as the ideal identification for king Ahab of Israel. I am encouraged in this by the fact that Aharoni’s description of the kingdom over which Lab’ayu reigned appears to correspond very well with the realm of Ahab as far as we know it: Lab’ayu was a serious contender with the kings of Jerusalem and Gezer. EA 250 indicates that ... he even dominated the entire Sharon, having conquered Gath-padalla (Jett in the central Sharon) and Gath-rimmon (apparently the biblical town of this name ...). Even in the north Lab’ayu was not content to possess only the hill country; he tried to penetrate into the Jezreel Valley, laying siege to Megiddo (EA 244) and destroying Shunem and some other towns (EA 250). [End of quotes] Conclusion The city of Sumur of the EA correspondence could not have been Samaria of Israel as Dr. Velikovsky had proposed, but was, as according to the standard interpretation, the port of Simyra. What Sumur may also have been That the port of Sumur/Simyra lies north of Byblos (my Babylon) and south of Ullaza (my Arzawa, tentatively) is apparent from what Dr. Mahmoud Elhosary has written (2009, p. 149): …. In his thirtieth regnal year, Thutmose [III] attacked the Lebanon coast in earnest, mounting an amphibious invasion. He left Egypt in early June and arrived in Lebanon a week later. Although the Annals do not tell us where he landed, the most logical place was the port city of Simyra, located about thirty miles by sea from the friendly port of Byblos. Lying just south of Ullaza, Simyra was the closest port to the mouth of the Eleutheros Valley. …. Gabriel, R.A., “Thutmose III: The Military Biography of Egypt's Greatest Warrior King”, Potomac Books, Inc. (2009) (3) Gabriel, R.A., "Thutmose III: The Military Biography of Egypt's Greatest Warrior King", Potomac Books, Inc. (2009) | Dr-Mahmoud Elhosary - Academia.edu Arzawa is closely associated with geographical names such as Mira and the Seha River Land. Thus, for instance: https://www.britannica.com/place/Anatolia/The-Middle-Kingdom Arzawa, with its satellites Mira, Kuwaliya, Hapalla, and the “Land of the River Seha …”. The latter might just possibly refer to the Chaldean Sealand, re-located from Sumer to NW Syria by Royce (Richard) Erickson in his groundbreaking article (2020): A PROBLEM IN CHALDAEAN AND ELAMITE GEOGRAPHY (3) Academia.edu | Search | A PROBLEM IN CHALDAEAN AND ELAMITE GEOGRAPHY Sumur, which can also read as Ṣimirra, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumur_(Levant) Sumur (Biblical Hebrew: צְמָרִי‎ [collective noun denoting the city inhabitants]; Egyptian: Smr; Akkadian: Sumuru; Assyrian: Simirra) was a Phoenician city in what is now Syria. It was a major trade center. The city has also been referred to in English publications as Simyra,[1] Ṣimirra, Ṣumra,[2] Sumura,[3] Ṣimura,[4] Zemar,[5] and Zimyra.[6] could then be Mira, an abbreviation of Ṣimirra. Thought to be situated far away in the Arzawan Lands of Anatolia, Mira (Simyra) and the Seha River Land (Sealand?) can probably take their place, instead, as approximate neighbours of Ullaza (Arzawa) and Byblos (Babylon).