Ricerc@Sapienza

The complete edition of the chancery texts from the palace archive L.2769 and vestibule L.2875 of Ebla (ARET XIII, ARET XVI, ARET

XVIII) forms a substantial corpus of data about the life, the relationships and exchanges between the court of Ebla and the kingdoms

and cities that Ebla either directly controlled or had agreements with on several issues. The present research intends to focus on the

dynamics of such a connected world in Syria in the 3rd millennium BC. In particular, the research aims at presenting the geography

of the kingdom of Ebla according to three main intertwined prospects:

1) The study of the environment: the network of relations between Ebla and other cities is settled within different environmental

conditions and situations that will be analysed accordingly, pointing out resources, risks and changes across time. As an example,

among the main resources in the territory, a central, but not an exclusive, role is played by the access to water. Through a territorial

and geo-morphological analysis, the research points to identify preferred passages for communication, movement of people and

transport of goods, the extension of the occupations of the cultivated areas, the zones of climatic uncertainty (e.g., oasis, the

steppe, natural vs artificial places).

2) The study of human interactions: The corpus of Ebla chancery texts records important pieces of information useful to define the

social and geopolitical situation at the time of the last kings of Ebla. On the one hand, the various recorded toponyms help to show

the geographical extension of the connected world in the 3rd millennium Syria.

On the other hand, the prosopographical analysis of the personal names allows revealing the relationships between Ebla and other

cities or kingdoms. In particular, attention will be devoted to the identification and analysis of the relations between long-term

inhabited centers and semi-nomadic groups.

3) The study of ancient economy: typology of goods will be described according to the place of origin and/or production. Thanks to

the archaeological data (e.g. pottery and seal impressions), this section aims at presenting diagrams of the economic flows (income

and outcome), and the analysis across time of the growth and decrease of amount of goods moved from one place to another and

stored. To analyse and establish the GDP of Ebla kingdom, these data will be compared with the total amount of goods recorded in

the administrative texts.

Data will be collected into a dialogic Atlas, available online: for each place, information on the environmental and economic contexts,

the itineraries of exchanges, the places of productions and the types and quantities of goods of this complex landscape will be 

offered. The Atlas will serve as a benchmark for further studies on Ebla and will be part of the publication of a volume of the series

ARES (Archivi Reali di Ebla. Studi, Harrassowitz-Verlag) devoted to the presentation of the results of the research.