Syria, gateway to the Orient― the excavations at Ebla

Ebla (today Tall Mardikh) was an ancient city located in northern Syria, about 40 km SW of Aleppo. Excavations in its archaeological site were conducted by an Italian team led by Paolo Matthiae in the mid-1960s and revealed a civilisation considered to be the oldest in Syria, which flourished in the 3rd and 2nd millenniums BC.
In the palace of this great kingdom, Ebla’s real treasure, a library of the Royal Archives containing more than 17.000 clay tablets was unearthed with impressed Sumerian cuneiform signs, documenting administrative texts, letters, treaties, literary text, in fact a library of information concerning the Ebla way of life. These tablets are considered to be part of one of the oldest libraries in the world, which held the world’s earliest bilingual dictionary.