Ebla tablets 1

Ebla tablets
The Ebla tablets are a collection of as many as 1800 complete clay
tablets, 4700 fragments and many thousand minor chips found in the
palace archives[1] of the ancient city of Ebla, Syria. The tablets were
discovered by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae and his team in
1974–75 during their excavations at the ancient city of Tell Mardikh.[2]
The tablets, which were found in situ on collapsed shelves, retained
many of their contemporary clay tags to help reference them. They all
date to the period between ca. 2500 BC and the destruction of the city
ca. 2250 BC.[3] Today, the tablets are being held in the Syrian
museums of Aleppo, Damascus, and Idlib.

A clay tablet found in Ebla, Syria

Language
Two languages appeared in the writing on the tablets: Sumerian, and a previously unknown language that used the
Sumerian cuneiform script (Sumerian logograms or "Sumerograms") as a phonetic representation of the locally
spoken Ebla language.Wikipedia:Citation needed The latter script was initially identified as proto-Canaanite by
professor Giovanni Pettinato, who first deciphered the tablets, because it predated the Semitic languages of Canaan,
like Ugaritic and Hebrew. Pettinato later retracted the designation and decided to call it simply "Eblaite", the name
by which it is known today.

The purely phonetic use of Sumerian logograms marks a momentous advance in the history of writing.[4] From the
clumsier system developed by Sumerian scribes, employing a mixed use of logograms and phonetic signs, the
scribes at Ebla employed a reduced number of signs from the existing systems entirely phonetically, both the earliest
example of transcription (rendering sounds in a system invented for another language) and a major simplifying step
towards "reader friendliness" that would enable a wider spread of literacy in palace, temple and merchant contexts.

Archaeological context
The tablets were discovered just where they had fallen when their wooden shelves burned in the final conflagration
of "Palace G". The archive was kept in orderly fashion in two small rooms off a large audience hall (with a raised
dais at one end); one repository contained only bureaucratic economic records on characteristic round tablets, the
other, larger room held ritual and literary texts, including pedagogical texts for teaching young scribes. Many of the
tablets had not previously been baked, but when all were preserved by the fire that destroyed the palace, their storage
method served to fire them almost as thoroughly as if in a kiln: they had been stored upright in partly recessed
wooden shelves, rectos facing outward, leaning backwards at an angle so that the incipit of each tablet could be seen
at a glance, and separated from one another by fragments of baked clay. The burning shelving pancaked – collapsing
in place and preserving the order of the tablets.[5]

Content and significance

The tablets provide a wealth of information on Syria and Canaan in the Early Bronze Age,[6] and include the first
known references to the "Canaanites", "Ugarit", and "Lebanon". The contents of the tablets reveal that Ebla was a
major trade center. A main focus was economic records, inventories recording Ebla's commercial and political
relations with other Levantine cities and logs of the city's import and export activities. For example, they reveal that
Ebla produced a range of beers, including one that appears to be named "Ebla", for the city. Ebla was also
responsible for the development of a sophisticated trade network system between city-states in northern Syria. This
Ebla tablets 2

system grouped the region into a commercial community, which is clearly evidenced in the texts.
There are king lists for the city of Ebla, royal ordinances, edicts, treaties. There are gazetteers listing place names,
including a version of a standardized place-name list that has also been found at Abu Salabikh (possibly ancient
Eresh) where it was datable ca. 2600 BC.[7] The literary texts include hymns and rituals, epics, proverbs.
Many tablets include both Sumerian and Eblaite inscriptions with versions of three basic bilingual word-lists
contrasting words in the two languages. This structure has allowed modern scholars to clarify their understanding of
the Sumerian language, at that time still a living language, because until the discovery of the tablet corpus there were
no bilingual dictionaries with Sumerian and other languages, leaving pronunciation and other phonetic aspects of the
language unclear. The only tablets at Ebla that were written exclusively in Sumerian are lexical lists, probably for
use in training scribes. The archives contain thousands of copybooks, lists for learning relevant jargon, and scratch
pads for students, demonstrating that Ebla was a major educational center specializing in the training of scribes.[]
Shelved separately with the dictionaries, there were also syllabaries of Sumerian words with their pronunciation in
Eblaite.

Biblical archaeology
Further information: Biblical archaeology
Rituals like the release of a scape goat laden with impurities[8] in purification rites connected with a wedding and
enthronement were immediately recognized as ancient Near Eastern parallels to Hebrew practice in the first
millennium, recorded in Leviticus 16.
The application of the Ebla texts to specific places or people in the Bible occasioned controversy, focused on
whether the tablets made references to, and thus confirmed, the existence of Abraham, David and Sodom and
Gomorrah among other Biblical references. The sensationalist claims were coupled with delays in the publication of
the complete texts, and it soon became an unprecedented academic crisis.[] The political context of the modern
Arab–Israeli conflict also added fire to the debate, turning it into a debate about the "proof" for Zionist claims to
Palestine. Among the most notable claims were that the attested presence of "yā" in Eblaite names was a supposed
form of Yahweh (a claim that has since been shown to be purely speculative);[9] speculation that local kings were
elected, claimed to be uniquely reminiscent of practices in early Israel – and a mythological introduction to a hymn
to the creator deity at Ebla, said to be akin to the account of creation in Genesis. However, much of the initial media
excitement about supposed Eblaite connections with the Bible, based on preliminary guesses and speculations by
Pettinato and others, is now widely deplored as generated by "exceptional and unsubstantiated claims" and "great
amounts of disinformation that leaked to the public".[10] The present consensus is that Ebla's role in biblical
archaeology, strictly speaking, is minimal.

References
[1] Numbers as in R. Biggs, "The Ebla tablets: an interim perspective", The Biblical Achaeologist 43 (1980:76-87); Palace G in the excavation
reports.
[2] Hans H. Wellisch, "Ebla: The World's Oldest Library", The Journal of Library History 16.3 (Summer 1981:488-500) p. 488f.
[3] Dumper; Stanley, 2007, p.141.
[4] The point is briefly made by Stephen D. Cole, in a letter "Eblaite in Sumerian Script" in The Biblical Archaeologist 40.2 (May 1977:49).
[5] Succinctly described in Wellisch 1981:492.
[6] Four volumes of essays on the Ebla language and the archives were published by the Center for Ebla Research, New York University, as the
series Eblaitica, begun in 1988.
[7] Giovanni Pettinato, "L'atlante geografico del vicino oriente attestato ad Ebla e ad Abū Salābikh", Orientalia 47 (1978:50-73).
[8] Ida Zatelli, "The Origin of the Biblical Scapegoat Ritual: The Evidence of Two Eblaite Texts", Vetus Testamentum 48.2 (April
1998):254-263)
[9] Mitchell Dahood, "The God Yā at Ebla?", Journal of Biblical Literature 100.4 (December 1981:607f) identifies theophoric names, but avoids
the contested identification with Yahweh.
[10] Chavalas, 2003, P.40–41.
Ebla tablets 3

Bibliography
• Moorey, Peter Roger Stuart (1991), A century of biblical archaeology (http://books.google.com/
?id=e1x9Rs_zdG8C&pg=PA149&dq=tablets+of+ebla&cd=6#v=onepage&q=tablets of ebla), Westminster
John Knox Press, ISBN 978-0-664-25392-9.
• Dumper, Michael; Stanley, Bruce E. (2007), Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical
Encyclopedia (http://books.google.com/?id=3SapTk5iGDkC&pg=PA141&dq=tablets+of+ebla&
cd=10#v=onepage&q=tablets of ebla), ABC-CLIO, ISBN 978-1-57607-919-5.
• Chavalas, Mark W. (2003), Mesopotamia and the Bible (http://books.google.com/?id=60fmNZQzwjYC&
printsec=frontcover&dq=Mesopotamia+and+the+Bible&cd=1#v=onepage&q=ebla), Continuum International
Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-567-08231-2.

External links
• Ebla Digital Archives (http://virgo.unive.it/eblaonline/cgi-bin/home.cgi) at Università Ca' Foscari Venice
• Ebla tablets (http://islin.wiki-net.tk/Ebla-Tablets.html)
Article Sources and Contributors 4

Article Sources and Contributors

Ebla tablets  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=621525565  Contributors: Attar-Aram syria, Becky Sayles, BigEars42, Chintu6, Christian75, Dbachmann, Drmies, JEH,
JohnBlackburne, Katelynjackson, Larry Grossman, Materialscientist, Metalello, Mmcannis, Niceguyedc, Nick Number, Ploversegg, RA0808, RhoOphuichi, StAnselm, The Utahraptor, Tiamut,
Til Eulenspiegel, Wetman, Woohookitty, Zozo2kx, 17 anonymous edits

Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

File:Ebla clay tablet.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Ebla_clay_tablet.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Babur, Mmcannis, Sumerophile, Wst

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