Ebla (Tell Mardikh) is one of the most important excavations in
Syria. It is a site of ca. 148 acres in size and has been excavated
yearly since 1964. It appears to have been occupied first about the
middle of the third millennium BC and quickly grew into a large and
important political center. It flourished until ca. 2300-2250 BC, when
it was attacked by a Mesopotamian king (either Sargon of Agade or his
grandson Naram-Sin).
Excavations at Ebla have centered around the great royal palace
that covered much of the acropolis in the middle of the town.
During the excavations of the palace in 1975, the excavators found
a large library (royal archive room), filled with tablets dating 2400
-2300 BC. Nearly 15,000 tablets and fragments were found, but when
joined together they will consitute about 2,500 tablets.
Written in the cuneiform characters originated by the Sumerians of
Mesopotamia, adapted to the language of Ebla's Semitic inhabitants,
the tablets show the city to have been an important commercial center
ruled by a merchant aristocracy with an elected king. They also reveal
the existence of a flourishing north Syrian civilization rivaling that
of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC.
Most of them are administrative texts relating to international
trade and palace distributions. There are also some grammatical texts
which give us insight into the local language of Ebla and a few
literary and ritual texts. The tablets had been arranged on shelves
along the walls of the room and had fallen in order onto the floor
when the shelves collapsed. Smaller collections of tablets were found
in other rooms of the palace.
The Ebla tablets are important because they includes the names of
cities and people that appear in the Old Testament, and therefore
provide evidence for the historical acuracy of the Bible.
Dr
Dig