ABSTRACT
The modern picture of Bronze Age Syria is very much a tale of three cities – Mari, Ugarit and Ebla – all extraordinarily rich sites testifying to the sophistication of the culture of the times. Mari lies on the middle Euphrates not far from the present Iraq-Syria border. Ugarit is a couple of kilometres back from the Syrian coast just north of Latakia while Ebla lies a little south of Aleppo. The first two have been dug by French expeditions: the exhaustive research over several decades being a supreme tribute to the tradition of Napoleonic commitment to scholarship on a grand scale. These sites have given great insights into the formative influences that shaped Syria: Mari looking along the Euphrates towards the Mesopotamian world; while Ugarit, a later site, turning towards
Figure 1.1 A ridge by the Barada
the Mediterranean and the great trading links that were later to knit Syria’s destiny with the Aegean. Until Ebla’s chance unearthing in the 1960s, there were few complementary insights into how inland western Syria had responded to these evolving influences.1
The Italian expeditions at Ebla have begun to fill in this gap. It has long been a self-fulfilling assumption that Damascus is a city older than time.
The belief that this was one of the first urban centres appears a little fanciful as we have no evidence of any large-scale settlement on the site of the present walled city at least until the second millennium BC. There is certainly evidence of earlier settlement in the wider Barada basin going back to 9000 BC but there is so far no consistent picture of how the Damascus area was exploited though it seems to have been only lightly populated.2 Even in the Bronze Age (after 3600 BC) there are no artificial mounds of any size in southern Syria (south of Homs) to match the numerous tells of northern or
