Idrimi

Idrimi (meaning "It is my help") was the king of Alalakh c. 1490–1465 BC, or around 1450 BC. He is known, mainly, from an inscription on his statue found at Alalakh by Leonard Woolley in 1939. According to that inscription, he was a son of Ilim-Ilimma I the king of Halab, now Aleppo, who would have been deposed by the new regional master, Barattarna, king of Mitanni. Idrimi would have succeeded in gaining the throne of Alalakh with the assistance of a group known as the Habiru, founding the kingdom of Mukish as a vassal to the Mitanni state. He also invaded the Hittite territories to the north, resulting in a treaty with the country Kizzuwatna. Jacob Lauinger considers Idrimi as a historical character, king of Alalakh around 1450 BC, in Late Bronze Age, but suggests his statue and inscriptions can be dated from c. 1400 to 1350 BC, and be related to a Mesopotamian pseudo-autobiography (called narû-literature), in which kings apparently leave records of their misadventures as a lesson for future generations. Lauinger also comments that the inscriptions try to legitimate the rule of Alalakh only by acknowledging the supremacy of Mitanni, and the text(s) may have had an audience coeval to politics of that time. All three sources were discovered by British archaeologist Leonard Woolley within the Level IV (Late Bronze Age in the mid-15th century BC) archives of the Alalakh palace and come from his collection at the British Museum. The inscription bears 104 lines "written in a provincial dialect of Akkadian," and records Idrimi's autobiographical vicissitudes on his statue's base found within a pit of a Level IB temple at the site of Tell Atchana (Alalakh). Jacob Lauinger dates the inscription around 1400-1350 BC, in Level III (/II) excavated by Woolley, or Period 3, according to Yener's excavations. The first part of the inscription revealed Idrimi's circumstances fleeing from Aleppo. The translated inscription, according to author Amélie Kuhrt, stated: "I am Idrimi, the son of Ilimilimma, servant of Teshub, Hepat, and Shaushga, the lady of Alalakh, my mistress.