Again on the “Grey Wares”,Ebla, the Steppe, and the South during Early Bronze IV

A re-examination of the photographic documentation of the EB IV pottery collected from the excavations at Ebla has allowed us to identify a group of sherds dating from late Early Bronze IVB that belong to the tradition of “grey wares” produced between Tell Mishrifeh/Qaṭna, Tell Shayrat and Tell Nebi Mend, and distributed primarily to Central and Southern Syria, and to the Painted Simple Ware of the central Syrian steppe. This is the first time that pottery produced in these areas is identified within an EB IVB assemblage of the Ebla region. This material may give some significance to another pottery fragment from Tell el-Khatri, also in the Ebla area, collected during the 1964 survey conducted by M. Liverani. This enveloped ledge handle, called this way because of the folded-over flaps, belongs to a typically southern Levantine type, which occurs also in southern Syria, like, for instance, in the Damascene, at Khirbet al-Umbashi and Dera‘a. The sherd from Tell el-Khatri might suggest that materials of southern Levantine tradition reached also northern Inland Syria in this period and thus far represents the northernmost discovery of EB IV southern pottery. These finds may inform us on contacts among different areas during EB IV. In the absence of petrographic analysis, any hypotheses concerning the ways southern pottery might have reached northern Syria is to some extent speculative, but there are hints pointing to the eastern path of north-south connectivity through the steppe and the desert rather than the western one along the central and upper Orontes Valley. Contacts between Ebla and the sites of the central Syrian steppe might have resumed in the new socio-political and socioeconomic scenario of the late EB IVB phase that also contributed to reshape the sociocultural backdrop of Syria at the turn between the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC.