Alalakh

Tell Açana, the archaeological site of ancient Alalakh, sits in the Plain of Antioch near the Asi River in Turkey's Hatay province, close to the Syrian border. The city came under the rule of the kingdom of Yamhad around 1700 BCE, later passing to Mitanni and then Hittite control. British excavations led by Leonard Woolley in the 1930s and 1940s unearthed roughly 500 cuneiform tablets, making Alalakh the single most important textual source for the history of the Yamhad and Mitanni kingdoms — documenting administration, treaties, and diplomatic correspondence from a city at the crossroads of Near Eastern power. The site today is an open archaeological field; the principal finds, including the tablets and sculptural remains, are held at the Hatay Archaeology Museum in Antakya.