Sumur in Amarna letters of Rib-Addi
by Damien F. Mackey “Velikovsky called this Rib-Addi king of Gubla and Sumur (var. Sumura) … which EA cities he had tried to equate with Ahab’s chief cities of, respectively, Jezreel and Samaria; though they are usually identified with the coastal cities of Byblos (Gebal) and Simyra”. What Sumur was not Sumur cannot realistically have been Samaria, as Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky had hopefully argued (Ages in Chaos, I, 1952). For, as I explained in my postgraduate thesis (2007, Volume One, pp. 83-87): …. Now EA’s [El Amarna’s] Lab’ayu, whom I shall be identifying with Ahab of Israel (c. 874-853 BC, conventional dates), appropriately straddles both part of Amenhotep III’s reign and the early part of Akhnaton’s. Velikovsky, for his part, had … looked to identify Ahab with Rib-Addi of Gubla, the most prolific Syro-Palestine correspondent to the EA pharaohs (over 50 letters in number). And this was surely a big mistake. For, in order for him to ‘make’ Ahab, like Rib-Addi, a v