Mari

Mari is not a monument that stands on its own; it is an archive. On the mound of Tell Hariri on the west bank of the Euphrates, it was a city-state between 2900 and 1759 BC, sitting squarely on the trade route between Sumer to the south and Ebla to the west. Some 25,000 cuneiform tablets came out of the mound. They set out the political map of the 2nd millennium BC in a detail no other source can match: trade networks reaching from Afghanistan to Crete, correspondence between kings, the daily record of running a state.

Getting there

125 kilometres south-east of Deir ez-Zor and 11 kilometres north-west of Abu Kamal, close to the Iraqi border. It lies on the same road as Dura-Europos, 30 kilometres apart, so the two go into one day.

How long it takes

Two hours. The site is large, but what you see is sections of mud-brick wall and excavation pits; without a guide to talk you through it, more than two hours is hard work.

What to see

The plan of Zimri-Lim’s palace can be read on top of the mound: the courtyards, the throne room and the archive rooms. Beside them are the remains of the temples of Ishtar and Dagan. Mud brick erodes once excavation exposes it to the air, so the walls stand lower now than they do in the dig photographs. The painted south façade of the part of the palace called the Court of the Palms has been rebuilt full-size in the Deir ez-Zor Museum — the plan is on the mound, the surface is in the museum.

What not to miss

How the mound was found. In 1933 a bedouin family digging into Tell Hariri for a gravestone struck a headless statue. Word reached the French authorities, a team from the Louvre began work that December, and the first thing they opened was the temple of Ishtar. The finds are now in the Louvre and in the museums of Damascus, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor.

The site today

Excavation stopped in 2011 and has not resumed. The site fell under the control of armed groups and was looted on a large scale. An official report drawn up in 2014 records that the diggers concentrated on the royal palace, the baths, the temple of Ishtar and the temple of Dagan. Satellite imagery shows the digging continuing until at least 2017. The surface today is pitted with holes. Go knowing that: what there is to see here is as much the measure of the loss as the ruin itself.