1361 AM · ≈ 2400 BCE · world history
Ebla and its archives
In the Syrian city of Ebla, palace archives of thousands of clay tablets are at work.
Ebla in northern Syria is a great trading city on the route between Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Mediterranean. In its palace some seventeen thousand tablets and fragments were found: inventories of cloth and metal, treaties with neighbours, school dictionaries of Sumerian and local words. The language of these texts is the oldest richly attested Semitic language of the western branch — kin to the stock from which the Canaanite dialects and Hebrew would grow. The city was burned, and the baked clay preserved the archive; today it shows how dense the world of Levantine cities was long before the days of the patriarchs.