Do you have any information on the Ebla Tablets found in Syria?

Dr. dig responds:
Ebla (Tell Mardikh) is one of the most important excavations in Syria. It is a site of ca. 148 acres in size and has been excavated yearly since 1964. It appears to have been occupied first about the middle of the third millennium BC and quickly grew into a large and important political center. It flourished until ca. 2300-2250 BC, when it was attacked by a Mesopotamian king (either Sargon of Agade or his grandson Naram-Sin).

Excavations at Ebla have centered around the great royal palace that covered much of the acropolis in the middle of the town.

During the excavations of the palace in 1975, the excavators found a large library (royal archive room), filled with tablets dating 2400 -2300 BC. Nearly 15,000 tablets and fragments were found, but when joined together they will consitute about 2,500 tablets.

Written in the cuneiform characters originated by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, adapted to the language of Ebla's Semitic inhabitants, the tablets show the city to have been an important commercial center ruled by a merchant aristocracy with an elected king. They also reveal the existence of a flourishing north Syrian civilization rivaling that of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC.

Most of them are administrative texts relating to international trade and palace distributions. There are also some grammatical texts that give us insight into the local language of Ebla and a few literary and ritual texts. The tablets had been arranged on shelves along the walls of the room, and when the shelves collapsed, the tablets had fallen in order onto the floor. Smaller collections of tablets were found in other rooms of the palace.

The Ebla tablets are important because they includes the name of cities and people that appear in the Old Testament, and therefore provide evidence for the historical accuracy of the Bible.