Ebla tablets
Content and significance
The tablets provide a wealth of information on Syria and Canaan in the Early Bronze Age,[8] and include the first known references to the "Canaanites", "Ugarit", and "Lebanon".[9]
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.[4] Ebla was also responsible for the development of a sophisticated trade network system between city-states in northern Syria. This system grouped the region into a commercial community, which is clearly evidenced in the texts.[9]
There are king lists for the city of Ebla, royal ordinances, edicts, and 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 dated to c. 2600 BC.[10] The literary texts include hymns and rituals, epics, and 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.[4] 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.[9] Shelved separately with the dictionaries, there were also syllabaries of Sumerian words with their pronunciation in Eblaite.