Ebla Tablets

The Ebla Tablets are a palace archive of as many as 1,800 complete clay tablets, along with thousands of fragments, uncovered by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae and his team at Tell Mardikh in Syria, the site of the ancient city of Ebla, in 1974 and 1975. They date from roughly 2500 BC to the destruction of Ebla around 2250 BC, in the Early Bronze Age, and are written in Sumerian and in Eblaite, a previously unknown Semitic language recorded by adapting Sumerian cuneiform signs to represent local speech. The archive documents Ebla as a major trading center with extensive commercial networks, and its bilingual word lists are counted among the earliest known dictionaries, evidence that the city also served as a training center for scribes. Early sensational claims connecting the tablets to figures and places in the Hebrew Bible have been largely rejected by later scholarship.