February 2008
by Marco Merola
Its arms arranged in a gesture of prayer, the figurine at right
probably depicts a living queen worshipping the statuette of a dead
royal, left. (Courtesy Maura Sala)
It's been more than 30 years since Italian archaeologists found a vast
archive of 17,000 cuneiform tablets at the Bronze Age site of Ebla in
northern Syria. But the ancient city is still surprising those who
work there. Last year archaeologist Paolo Matthiae's team discovered
two almost perfectly preserved figurines that confirm textual evidence
for a royal cult of the dead focused on the city's queens. They also
found an unusual tablet that allowed scholars to reconstruct the
political climate that led to Ebla's destruction in 2300 B.C., when it
was sacked by Sargon of Akkad.
"We made the finds in two peripheral rooms of the great Royal Palace,
where we discovered the cuneiform archive in the 1970s," explains
Matthiae. "They were part of the zone behind the Court of the Audience
Hall, a sort of storage area which must have held the treasures of the
king of Ebla."
Initially the team avoided the rooms, assuming they had been emptied
when Sargon ransacked the city. "But we were wrong!" says Matthiae.
"Evidently the two statues were crushed into the ground and
miraculously escaped the pillage."
Both figurines are intricate representations of women, which are rare
in Near Eastern Bronze Age art. One, made of steatite and wood, is
depicted with her arms arranged in a gesture indicating prayer. The
second figurine holds a goblet and wears an ornate gold dress. Both
seem to have been used in a ritual mentioned in a tablet from Ebla
that describes how the city's dead queens became female deities who
were then worshiped privately by their successors. Matthiae suspects
the steatite figure depicts a living queen who would have prayed to
the gold-covered figurine, itself a representation of a dead queen who
had become a goddess.
[image]
This cuneiform tablet, ca. 2300 B.C., details arms shipments from Ebla
to allied states. (Courtesy Maura Sala)
In the same area, Matthiae found a cuneiform tablet which accounted
for weapons distributed from Ebla to allied cities during a war
sometime before 2300 B.C. "The military campaign the tablet mentions
is possibly the one Ebla waged against the state of Mari," says
Matthiae. Records indicate that Ebla defeated Mari, its great
commercial and political rival, just before it in turn was destroyed.
Matthiae thinks Ebla's military aggression alarmed the powerful states
of southern Mesopotamia, such as Akkad, because soon after its
conflict with Mari, Sargon launched his campaign against the city.
The tablet lists the number of spear points Ebla sent to each of its
allied states, a stark expression of the political influence and
military prowess the southern states feared. Nagar, today known as
Tell Brak was the biggest client, receiving 2,000 spear points.
According to Matthiae, this proliferation of weaponry may have
impelled Sargon to launch the preemptive strike against Ebla, which
ended the state.
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