Legal Regulations at Ebla - An Overview

The article offers an overview on legal practices at Ebla (Syria, ca. 2400-2350 BCE), as attested in selected chancery texts stemming from the Central Archive and the adjacent vestibule, within the palace area. Remarkably, abundant information on the primary archaeological settings of the tablets is available. This fact allows for a better understanding of the role legal materials played within the broader frame of the local scribal milieu. The evidence is in fact diverse, as the archives include administrative tablets, literary text, lexical lists, etc. As for legal materials, both international law and local legal procedures are well attested, respectively in the form of treaties and collections of legal provisions, arranged in casuistic form. The presence of draft materials alongside well-formed documents suggests a complex intellectual environment, where normative and theoretical texts coexisted as part of a larger, coherent whole.