Ebla Tablets

The tablets were discovered in the 1970s by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae at the ancient site of Tell Mardikh in modern-day Syria. This site was revealed to be the ruins of Ebla, a powerful and wealthy Bronze Age city-state. The archive was found remarkably well-preserved within the ruins of the royal palace.

The tablets date back to roughly 2400 to 2300 BCE, placing them firmly in the Early Bronze Age. This makes them one of the oldest known archival libraries in human history. They predate many other famous cuneiform texts by several centuries, offering a rare window into early Semitic cultures.

The collection of roughly 17,000 tablets provides unprecedented details regarding Ebla's administration, economy, and diplomatic relations with neighboring empires like Mari. Crucially, they contain extensive dictionaries translating Sumerian into Eblaite, an early Semitic language. They also list previously unknown cities and offer early references to deities and names similar to those found in the Hebrew Bible.

The tablets are primarily written in Sumerian and Eblaite, utilizing the ancient cuneiform script. While Sumerian was the language of scholarship, the scribes of Ebla used cuneiform to phonetically spell out their native Eblaite tongue. This bilingual archive was essential for scholars in fully deciphering the Eblaite language.