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Kings, Priests and Ancestors: The Shaping and Celebration of Middle Bronze Age Northern Levantine Elites Through Visual Media as Seen from Tell Mardikh/Ebla.

DISCEPOLI, Andrea

The site of Tell Mardikh/ancient Ebla is highly renowned for the richness of its material culture, especially for what concerns Early Bronze Age IVA-B and Middle Bronze Age I-II. Indeed, this abundance of data has made possible, since the beginning of the excavations in 1964, to offer detailed and sound historical and historic-artistic reconstructions of many aspects of the Eblaic material culture. Thus, in this contribution, bringing together published and new data, it would be offered an analysis of the iconography of specific characters holding curved objects represented on carved basins, steles, obelisks, seals and talismans mainly coming from Middle Bronze Age Ebla, but which are identifiable also on later images reaching the Iron Age. These evidence will be confronted with statues and clay figurines coming from the site and from the rest of the region, together with a peculiar copper-alloy curved artefact uncovered at Ebla in 2003. In such way, it will be possible to show how, during the Middle Bronze Age, in the Northern Levant and especially at Ebla, a series of different visual and physical media communicated together and contributed to the definition and celebration of a series of earthly and divine high status personages.

Session 4. Crafting Identity and Clusters through Material Culture, Iconography and Texts [info]