Boris Alexandrov

The question of the meaning of the term in the Old Babylonian Mesopotamia has a long history and remains under discussion. The texts from Mari are of great importance for the studies on this term, as they provide a great number of its occurrences (approximately 130 in 100 documents). The materials from Mari do not support a view that muškēnum denotes tenants of crown land. In most cases it is a designation of common citizens belonging to the communities as opposed to the state sector of socio-economic structure. The use of the term to qualify the dependant low rank personnel of the palace is quite rare. Since originally the word muškēnum had semantics of submission and dependence, even high-ranking persons can be called muškēnum when opposed to the king as supreme ruler of the land. The article has two supplements. The first one provides references to the attestations of the word muškēnum in the Mari corpus. The second one focuses on the analysis of its orthographic variants (with cuneiform signs UŠ and ÚŠ in the second position). One may note a relatively high percentаge of occurrences with UŠ-sign, which was probably pronounced /us/. This leads to a discussion on possible reinterpretation of the word in Mari Akkadian where it may have been also connected with the root SKN ‘to dwell’.