Rita Dolce is Associate Professor of Archaeology and History of Near Eastern Cultures and Fine Arts at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italy, and a member of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Syria, where she has excavated for 40 years at the site of Tell Mardikh-Ebla. Her research interests lie mainly in the figurative art, urban topography and architecture of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and Syria. She has written numerous books and articles focusing particularly on visual communication as the language of power and a means of dissemination in the societies of the Ancient Near East, and on the urban origins of Ebla, its palatial culture and the structure and significance of cult places in this important Early Syrian kingdom.