Comporre una statua. Forme e azioni nella creazione di un’immagine

The creation of statues has been a common action in the Ancient Near East, since the most ancient periods: e.g., the modeling of skulls with layers of painted clay can in all respects be considered a production if not of real statues at least of pseudo-statues, or rather artificial images that they had to be displayed and visible to a certain number and type of people. The archaeological and epigraphic documentation of Ebla, in the Early Bronze Age IVA, is highly significant for the study of the manufacture of statues and their use in different contexts within the public spaces of the city of the 3rd millennium BC. For the nature of the findings of sculptures in the rooms of the royal palace of Ebla, it is possible to appreciate the manufacturing technique of the Eblaic workshops and, in some cases, the result of the finished product: textual information is added to the archaeological data, mostly administrative texts, which describe the releases of materials and the actions required to create new images or repair old ones.