The Third Pole: The Lost Kingdom of Ebla

The Third Pole: The Lost Kingdom of Ebla

For three thousand years, one of the ancient world's most powerful civilizations lay buried beneath a mound of Syrian soil, its name forgotten, its achievements unknown. Then, in 1974, Italian archaeologists uncovered twenty thousand clay tablets beneath the ruins of a Bronze Age palace, and the lost kingdom of Ebla spoke again.

The Third Pole recovers the full story of ancient Ebla, the great Syrian city-state that flourished on the northern plateau between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean in the third and second millennia BC. At its height, Ebla commanded a commercial empire stretching from the Taurus Mountains to the Nile, administered by a sophisticated palace bureaucracy, governed by institutions that placed meaningful checks on royal power, and documented in an archive that preserves the world's oldest international treaty, its oldest multilingual dictionaries, and an entirely unknown Semitic language.

Drawing on fifty years of Italian archaeological excavation and the scholarship of the archive's leading interpreters, this book reconstructs Ebla's three kingdoms, their rise, their destructions, and their recoveries, from the age of Sargon of Akkad through the Amorite renaissance to the final Hittite fire of 1600 BC. It also confronts the site's most recent chapter: the damage inflicted by the Syrian civil war and the ongoing struggle to preserve what four millennia of burial have kept safe.

Ebla was not a footnote to the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was their equal, a third pole of Bronze Age achievement whose recovery changes everything we thought we knew about the ancient world.