Ricerc@Sapienza

A re-examination of the photographic documentation of the EB IV pottery collected from the excavations at Ebla has allowed us to identify a group of sherds dating from late Early Bronze IVB that belong to the tradition of “grey wares” produced between Tell Mishrifeh/Qaṭna, Tell Shayrat and Tell Nebi Mend, and distributed primarily to Central and Southern Syria, and to the Painted Simple Ware of the central Syrian steppe. This is the first time that pottery produced in these areas is identified within an EB IVB assemblage of the Ebla region.

The excavation of Building FF2 at Ebla provided new important data related to the tradition of wall paintings in Early Bronze Age Syria. This tradition still remains quite poorly known and understood, and the way to an interpretation of the relevant features, meanings and developments is thus mostly made of comparisons with findings from other regions and periods. The main difficulties are here represented by the lack of shared approaches in recording and publishing information on this kind of material witness, in particular in relation to technical and technological aspects.

The present paper was carried out with the aim of formalizing some peculiar aspects of the urbanistic plan of Ebla (Tell Mardikh) discussing the topology of the “City of the Throne” through the mythopoetic conceptual framework of the ancient Near East kingship ideology and cosmic geography.

The Italian Archaeological Expedition to Ebla has always paid attention to the preservation of the site. When the Royal Palace G was brought to light, the expedition started considering the problem of its preservation and/or restoration in the interest of the Syrian Authorities of the site and for the general public’s curiosity. In the late 1990s, thanks to an important grant from the European Community, a plan for the preservation of all the monuments of the site started.

The possible representation of steles on one seal from the Royal Palace G of EB IVA Ebla is being considered in this contribution. By comparison with the written evidence, an attempt will be made at understanding how successful steles were made, where they were placed, and what their meaning for the visual image of kingship in the culture of the mature Early Syrian Ebla was

Taking into account the motifs derived from the Egyptian art from the observatory of Ebla, some considerations may be proposed about the times and modes of such presence. It is certain that the relations between Egypt and Syria started in Early Bronze IVA; gifts were exchanged between courts, certainly with Byblos, but possibly also with Ebla.

The contribution summaries the main characteristics of art history through an overview of the history of the discipline and uses the case study of Ebla to comment on a specific aspect of Eblaic society pertaining to the creation of the image of kingship in the mature Early Syrian period.

While in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia polymaterism was not such a diffused practice, at Ebla, the use to compose figures with different materials, in large, as well as in miniature size images reached a peak, in the skills manifested in the assemblage of the materials, in the wealth of the raw materials employed and in the variety of objects produced.

In this contribution I present one of the seals in the “palace style” from Palace G of Ebla of 2300 BC. The seal is characterized by the presence of two divine female figures, Ishkhara and Aštar/Ištar who were important in the Eblaic pantheon and were closely related with kingship. For this reason, and for the location of the sealings, I propose that the seal belonged to a very important official, personally related with the king.

The development of the so-called “secondary” urban civilizations is related to the capacity/necessity to exploit ecosystems different from those created by the presence of large rivers. In north inner Syria the different ecosystems and the possibilities they offered were exploited in a most effective way, leading to the birth and development of complex urban systems, which flourished during the second half of the third and the first half of the second millennium BC.