Free The Oxford History of the Biblical World by Michael D. Coogan

Ebla (2000 to 1600 BCE ). But in 1973, Paolo Matthiae,the director, opened a field along the edge of the acropolis to examine the late-third-millennium stratum of the site, and came down on part of a royal palace. In 1974, 32 cuneiform tablets were found in a room of the palace, all of them economic documents and using the Sumerian script, although occasional words, written syllabically, belonged to a Semitic language. In 1975, a second room with texts (Room 2712) was excavated; it had about 200 tablets, along with some fragments. But it was eclipsed by the discovery of Room 2769, south of the main entry into the palace. Here thousands of tablets and fragments were unearthed in a main archive room. Many had been stored on shelves that had collapsed when the palace was destroyed by fire, so that the tablets lay in rows amid the rubble on the floor. By the end of 1975, there were 17,000 catalogued tablets and fragments, which when put together represented about 2,500 tablets, approximately 2,100 of which were found in the main archive. This number makes Ebla’s one of the largest recovered archives of the third millennium BCE from the Near East.
    The Ebla texts are difficult to decipher, and initial reports of direct links between them and the Bible have been proved wrong. What we now know is that approximately 80 percent of the tablets are economic and administrative documents, mostly recording royal dealings in a wide variety of goods—gold, silver, clothing, wood, olive oil, spices, and weapons, as well as livestock and their by-products. Textiles seem to have been particularly important commodities. The tablets give detailed information about the type of long-distance trade that was carried on by the great cities of Syria and Mesopotamia during this period. Scholarly suppositions about the importance of trade in the development of cities, as described above, seem borne out by the picture of Ebla’s economic activity that these tablets give.
    The administrative texts also show that Ebla controlled a large area of northern Syria, in part directly through appointed governors or local overseers and in part through client kings. They also reveal the highly developed bureaucracy of the city, which the king headed and which a wide range of subordinate officials administered.
    Among the noneconomic tablets are a few literary texts (such as hymns); incantation texts; lists of animals, birds, professions, and the like; Sumerian vocabulary lists, some with Semitic equivalents; lists of geographical data; and a few mathematical texts. Unfortunately, most of these writings do not provide information about Eblaite culture because they are actually copies of Mesopotamian works used as part of scribal training at Ebla. A notable exception is a large vocabulary list that may give the Eblaite equivalents to hundreds of Sumerian words. This and other fragments of the local language show that the language of the city, called Eblaite, is closely related to Old Akkadian, a Mesopotamian Semitic dialect.
    The tablets provide only the most superficial information about the religion of Ebla, but it is clear that many of the great West Semitic deities were worshiped there. Gods such as Ilu (El), Hadad, Athtar, Dagan, Rashap (biblical Resheph), Malik, and the sun-god (whose name is not spelled out) are all deities well known from later texts, including the Bible. The Ebla tablets also mention Sumerian and otherwise unknown deities.
    Despite the wealth of information in the tablets, several basic facts about the Ebla archives remain unclear. For instance, the date of the archives is still in question. Matthiae, the archaeological director of the Ebla excavations, has argued that theyshould be dated to 2300–2250 BCE , based on the supposition that the palace in which they were found probably was destroyed by the Mesopotamian king Naram-Sin. But others, including the original epigraphist of the Ebla team, Giovanni Pettinato, have argued from the