«Vieni, lascia che ti dica di altre città»

The Orontes is the main watercourse in the Levant, and its valley has always been a principal land route in the Near East. On this river, during the Late Bronze Age, the Semitic and Indo-European worlds met and clashed: in direct contact for the first time. The book has a sequential approach to the subject of the Late Bronze Age in the Orontes Valley. As an essential background to any archaeological, historical or topographical study, the first topic discussed – in Part I – is the physical setting of the river, whose drainage basin covers over 23,000 km2 between the Mediterranean and continental Asiatic areas. After a detailed description, with a glance also at some toponomastic problems, an analysis of the climate and the environment follows; and special attention is given to our understanding of conditions in antiquity. In Part II, all the available archaeological data concerning the valley are collected and analyzed, so as to reconstruct the ancient settlement strategies employed there. Besides the specialist literature, topographical maps and satellite images are widely used. All the Late Bronze Age texts that mention places in the valley are catalogued in Part III according to their historical context and geographical origin, in order to offer an overall view of the available sources. Great care is given to the analysis of the Great Topographical List of Thutmose III, and to the study of the Alalah tablets, still not available in a complete one-volume edition. On this basis, a gazetteer of toponyms has been drawn up in Part IV, and an attempt made to find for each one a more-or-less certain position on the map, with the help of comparisons between geographical, archaeological and textual data. Afterwards, this information is used to reconstruct the political geography of the valley in the Late Bronze Age. An excursus on the several names given to the river over time closes this part. All this material is used in the final section, devoted to an integrated account of the history of the valley during the Late Bronze Age (Part V). The volume includes an English and an Arabic résumé, indices and detailed cartography.