Sin also marched up the Euphrates River, destroying cities such as Mari and Tuttul (Tell
Bi’a) on their way to further conquests to the northwest. Physical proof of these
military activities may be reflected by the considerable augmentation to fortifications
seen in the latest EB levels of most settlements in the middle Euphrates region (Cooper
2006 : 73 ), and by the destruction of the Jebel Bazi citadel on the Euphrates at Tell
Banat, which is argued to have been the result of a military encounter between the
inhabitants of the settlement, which was possibly the city of Armanum, and the
Akkadian forces under Naram-Sin (Otto 2006 ). Further to the west, many attribute
the destruction by fire of the great Palace G at Ebla in the late twenty-fourth century
BCto the Akkadian king Sargon, this event effectively bringing an end to Ebla’s
supremacy in the west, although still others argue that Ebla’s demise may have been at
the hands of Mari, the other major political power vying for control over the Euphrates
and parts of western Syria during this period (Archi and Biga 2003 : 35 ). Whatever
military encounters occurred, and whoever they were orchestrated by, neither western
Syria nor the Euphrates River Valley was brought to the brink of collapse. On the
contrary, while there are signs of disturbances and the demise of some settlements, still
other settlements continued to exist and flourish up to the end of the third millennium
BC. In the middle Euphrates River Valley, one sees the abandonment of the large polity
of Tell Banat/Bazi, and of smaller sites such as Jerablus Tahtani, but other urban centres
such as Tell es-Sweyhat continued to thrive until at least 2100 BC(Cooper 2006 :
264 – 265 ). A recent re-assessment of occupation within and around Carchemish to the
north suggests that the city flourished late in the Early Bronze Age and continued to
be settled, without a break, into the second millennium BC(Peltenburg 2010 ). In
western Syria, while Ebla’s famed palace may have been brought to a fiery end, this
event did not signal the demise of Ebla as a city. We know that another EB palace was
re-established in the northern part of the city’s lower town, and that EB settlement
continued at this site for several more centuries (Pinnock 2009 : 69 – 71 ). Still other
settlements in western Syria have ample evidence for continued occupation into the
last centuries of the third millennium (Schwartz 2007 b: 49 – 52 ).
It is difficult to account for the success of settlement in western Syria and parts of
the Euphrates Valley, especially when other regions such as the Khabur Plains to the
east or the southern Levant underwent several centuries of impoverishment and
ruralisation in the latter part of the third millennium. We may surmise that a number
of factors were involved, one at least of which was the regions’ distance from major
power-centres of the Near East from which some of the most significant destabilising
effects emanated, namely southern Mesopotamia and Egypt. Neither western Syria nor
the middle Euphrates Valley was ever directly controlled by rulers from these lands, nor
were the regions’ economies utterly dependent on their ties to these lands for their
continued success and survival. Thus when Egypt experienced decline at the end of the
Old Kingdom, and Mesopotamia underwent a series of regime changes at the end of
the third millennium, these events and their consequences do not seem to have dra-
matically affected the essential livelihood of the Syrian principalities. On the contrary,
the relatively peaceful centuries of EB IV in western Syria paved the way for the rapid
urban renewal that took place in the succeeding Middle Bronze Age, and allowed for
the continuation of occupation at most of the major western Syrian sites such as Ebla,
Hama and Mishrifeh/Qatna, and Carchemish on the Euphrates (Morandi-Bonacossi
2009 : 65 and 66 n. 19 ; Peltenburg 2010 ).
–– Lisa Cooper ––