indications of ruling families outside of the evidence for rich tombs are not always easy
to find. In western Syria, evidence for the storage and redistribution of large quantities
of materials has been recovered from a large complex of structures on the acropolis
mound during the second half of the third millennium BCat the site Mishrifeh/Qatna
(Morandi Bonacossi 2007 : 69 ). It may prove to be something on the order of a palatial
structure, but elsewhere in western Syria beyond Ebla, similar palaces have not been
discovered. In the middle Euphrates Valley, the absence of artefacts pointing to large-
scale economic or large-scale administrative activities within the few large-scale secular
buildings which have been discovered cannot justify the existence of a centralised and
bureaucratised royal establishment with extensive control over the rest of the settle-
ments. Moreover, the diversity of house structures, the variability of outer city defences,
and the presence of independently operated production facilities at these Euphrates
sites suggest that many aspects of the cities’ operations fell outside the controlling forces
of these elite complexes (Cooper 2006 : 141 ).
The organisation of authority or kingship in western Syria and the middle
Euphrates is clearly very complex, and given the varied expressions of elite status
manifested in this region, it is probable that the nature of power fluctuated greatly as
did the degree to which it was attained and exercised in each community. Perhaps we
can envision that while some elite groups played a prominent role in socio-economic
and political activities at some sites, and there may even have been local rulers with a
degree of wealth or control over some facets of urban society, still other sites had a
tradition in which an exclusionary or centralising authority was far more limited. This
latter model would certainly fit well with what we know from contemporary or later
textual sources from Syria, which speak of councils of elders in some communities,
these groups either serving as an official body that decided town affairs in the absence
of a local individual chief or king, or existing alongside them, serving as an inde-
pendent body of decision-making for the community and off-setting the attainment
of exclusionary power among any one elite group or individual (Schwartz 1994 : 166 ;
Stein 2004 : 74 ; Fleming 2004 : 190 – 200 ). Whatever the case, it seems clear from the
evidence just described that the nature of kingship in western Syria differed from the
well-known examples of city rulers that existed in Sumer from the same time period.CONCLUSIONS
As the summary above has tried to emphasise, connections between Sumer and parts
of western Syria were clearly present and resulted in a number of significant develop-
ments, including the intensification of long-distance trade and commercial exchanges
as well as the appropriation of symbols of power, which were particularly of benefit to
elite members in Syrian society desirous to showcase their wealth and prestige within
their communities and among their peers from neighbouring polities. But differences
between the regions, rooted in deep-seated religious traditions, social structures and
concepts of decision-making and leadership, meant that western Syria and the middle
Euphrates Valley followed different developmental trajectories, especially during the
third millennium BC. Even though all the areas shared strides towards increasingly
complex societies and urban environments, the particular nature of those phenomena,
and the way they manifested themselves materially, continued to differ for the duration
of the millennium. The areas’ different environmental zones were responsible for some
–– Cultural developments in western Syria ––