[Historiae].

Abstract

The escape is the practice that changes a person into a fugitive. Such escape might have been induced by economic, political and/or social reasons. Generally, two terms were used to identify people who ran away from their habitat: hapirum and munnabtum. In this paper, I will follow the viewpoints of Bottéro and Rowton to denote that the former were social rootless people while the latteraccording to Buccellatiwere politically displaced individuals. These stances do not agree with Durand’s perspective about such social actors located within the political scenario at Mari. This author defines and re-defines them throughout several papers to finally understand the hapirum as political adversaries and the munnabtum as emigrants due to specific situations. Based on the analysis of the approaches of all the mentioned authors, we get to understand that the term hapirum would explain the situation of emigrant/immigrant people. The alleged political opposition of these social actors was not the source of their displacement but one of the consequences resulted from it. Thereafter, the political aspect that would sheathe the hapirum would be a result of their need and not the motive. Conversely, the term munnabtum would actually imply a political bias that could be traced out by finding them isolated or hunted individually by the political power. Thus, the aim of this paper is to set out the complexity that the translation of certain terms involves and, considering the cases 1 Una primera versión de este trabajo fue presentada en el Workshop “Convegno internazionale. Costruzione / distruzione / rafforzamento dell’identità. Tolleranza, integrazione e guerra nelle società del Vicino Oriente antico e altre culture”, "Sapienza" Universidà di Roma, 12 de abril de 2013.