A soft step and a little drop. On the acoustic experience of the Early Bronze Age temple of the rock at Ebla

Recent studies in the field of sensory archaeology – that encompasses the meaning and impact of senses in the past and in the comprehension of past phenomena – developed new theories and methods in the archaeological research starting from not only visible and tangible data but also envisioning no longer existing (visible, tangible and audible) information from the past. Sensory archaeology, in fact, looks at what we can label an experimental approach to the past and archaeological contexts assuming that the analysis of the perception through the senses can eventually disclose new possibility and attempts for a wider comprehension of the use of material culture, on the one hand, and architecture and landscape, on the other. Recently, the definition of sensescape precisely points to the evaluation of not only the five senses but, more specifically, how the perception through senses affected the cognition of the space around (the peripersonal space) and the system of communication (interrelations with the space, the things and the people within): in this respect, this approach led to new affordances and perspectives on the different degrees of past interactions in the societies of the ancient Near East. Of course, a process of contextualization is necessary: the use of senses must be settled in the past and in a precise archaeological context so that general assumptions and too generic reconstructions can be avoided. Moreover, the evaluation of the senses must go through an emic process that takes into account the perspective and meaning that are given by the society under examination: the risk of flattening the sensory experience of the past on our modern perception and evaluation of the use and impact of senses is always round the corner. In this respect, does a classification of senses exist? Based on contemporary society and forced by the nature of the archaeological evidence, it might be logic to give the sight the first rank of the classification. Does the result also reflect the reality of the past? Can we in fact infer that sight was the most exploited sense by the ancient societies in the Near East? It seems to me that since we still see the ruins of landscape, cities and buildings we are inevitably forced to cope with the sight assuming that what we see might in fact corresponds to what ancient people saw or, conversely, that what we no longer see was once clearly visible to the ancient people. The present paper analyses the effect of sound speaking against the tyranny of sight in archaeological contexts: cities and architecture are not only spaces that can be seen but they also resound and this very specific quality will be presented starting from the example of the Temple of the Rock at Ebla. In particular, starting from the definition of “acoustemology” by Steven Fold, the present communication will try to disclose the knowledge of ancient space and architecture though and via the sonic quality of the environment and materiality of things and objects – where also people become in the end auditory elements of what we can label a soundscape. Recent studies of ancient acoustic places will be taken into consideration in the introduction to settle the field of the research and the methodology of investigation, whereas the systems of acoustic resonance will be investigated to point out the role and importance of the sound in the perception and as a cognitive instrument for the communication and shared participation of individual: it is time to give the past an ear, going beyond the exclusivity of the eye showing how sound (not exclusively music, but even the noise) affects the process of interactions and the construction of the self socially, in relations to the others and the neighbouring (un)built space.