The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition

Hana was a Syrian kingdom located in the Middle Euphrates region north of Mari, which included the ancient city of Terqa. Hana is known only from a few dozen texts, but those texts are dated to the reigns of between nineteen and twenty-one kings. There is no king-list that includes the kings of Hana and the kingdom almost never is mentioned in documents from other cities and kingdoms. Nevertheless, Hana seems to have been one of the few kingdoms that thrived in the sixteenth century B.C.E., an era that is poorly understood.

In this volume Dr. Prodany demonstrates how the kings of Hana can be placed in sequence and assigned approximate dates, based on typologies of the main features of a group of texts that make up the majority of the corpus - contracts for the purchase, bequest, and inheritance of real estate.