ABSTRACT
The abundance of archaeological and textual evidence, and of outstanding quality, gives Ebla a special place in the studies aiming for an integrated historical reconstruction of a town and its chora. In fact, Ebla has provided one of the widest and most complete corpora of evidence written, symbolic, and material among the sites of the time in the Near East. The research offers some preliminary results in the archaeological, epigraphic, bioarchaeological, archaeometric, geomorphological, and ecological spheres, aims at reconstructing the landscape of the Eblaite chora in its historical and socioeconomic aspects, besides the natural ones. The specific ecological and social foundations of the Ebla chora help explain the contrast between Ebla and other centers in lower Mesopotamia, since the need to organize a large agricultural hinterland induced the central administration of Ebla to progressively erode social and ownership patterns at its own advantage, thus causing significant potential instability.
