An Ancient City Lives

In 1955 a farmer unearthed a strange item in the Syrian sands: a snarling lion carved from gray basalt. He dug a little further and found a ritual basin ringed with marching warriors and a banquet scene. The pieces ended up in the national museum at Aleppo.

Seven years later the Syrian government requested an archaeological team in a cultural exchange with Italy. In charge was Archaeologist Paolo Matthiae, 22. The intense young archaeologist decided to search for a settlement from the 2nd millennium B.C. that would reveal the urban roots of Western European culture. He had dated the broken basin to that era and discovered, near the farmer's field, the imposing Tell Mardikh with telltale pottery shards strewn across its surface. The dig began in 1964. What was found raised more questions, but no sensational finds--till four years later. Then, on a scorching day, workers uncovered a 2nd millennium headless basalt statue of a man wearing a robe inscribed with the first cuneiform signs found on the site. In the 26 columns of writing one electrifying word stood out:

Ebla. Matthiae suddenly realized that he had discovered a city as potentially revealing as Troy.

The team kept at work analyzing the layers, fixing the phases of the settlement's life, beginning with a Bronze Age farming settlement of 3000 B.C.

and ending with a city in political and cultural decline, destroyed in 1600 B.C. by the invading Hittites. In 1973 the team found a royal palace from the 3rd millennium and, a year later, a small room with 42 tablets, resembling petrified waffles flung across the floor. The cuneiform on some tablets was Sumerian; on others it was indecipherable. Almost 1,000 more tablets were unearthed in September 1975.

The day that would make Ebla a historic find came at the end of that month. The team located a wall of a small palace room and sank a shaft into its west corner. Matthiae peered down--and saw the most significant library of the ancient world ever found. "My first impression," he says, "was that I was looking at a sea of clay tablets." Most were in piles on the floor where they had crashed down as the city was sacked in 2250 B.C. Ironically, the fire of the Akkadian conquerers ensured that the tablets would survive the passage of centuries, baking them to a stonelike hardness.

Professor of Assyriology Giovanni Pettinato was mystified by the writings. Cuneiform is, after all, not a language, only a style of writing. While the epigraphist could recognize the characters, some of them formed words of a language he had never encountered. Pettinato pondered photographs of the tablets for three months, then cracked the code. Sumerian characters had been used to write an early Western Semitic tongue he dubbed "Eblaite." On other tablets, straight Sumerian was written, functioning as an official language, as Latin did in medieval Europe.

Now out of the cryptic tablets tumbled thousands of names, places, deals and directives, accounts of taxes paid, textiles traded and treaties sealed. One tablet listed 70 names of animals; another, 260 ancient cities not yet known to historians. Still another was a breakdown of booty taken in a conquest of neighboring Mari, 240 miles away: the victorious commander got 15%, the rest went to the king of Ebla. Along with some literary documents, Pettinato also discovered a spectacular bonus: bilingual dictionaries, the oldest ever found, matching Eblaite words to Sumerian equivalents --and confirming his readings of the new language.

In the years since there have been bitter arguments about the meaning of Ebla, but one undisputed fact rises above the clamor: the Tell Mardikh find ranks with such 20th century archaeological sensations as the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt (1922), Ugarit (1929), Mari on the middle Euphrates (1930s) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947).

In the end, Ebla may outrank them all. For the tablets reveal the unsuspected existence of an urbane culture that gathered some 30,000 traders, farmers, bureaucrats, artisans and an extraordinary academy of scribes within the circular walls of a great commercial city. Moreover, Ebla dominated an outlying area of perhaps 300,000 people, one of the largest populations of any ancient city-state. The discovery has closed the archaeological gap between Egypt and, to the east, Sumer.

The Tell Mardikh strata reveal that Ebla reached its zenith in the middle of the 3rd millennium, around 2300 B.C. It reigned over a vast network of trade routes, lending business expertise to cities hundreds of miles away. A century later it had apparently fallen, its coffers plundered and its walls razed by rivals to the south.

Amid the outpouring of dry statistics, the rich fabric of an independent culture has begun to emerge, one so affluent that it may well have rivaled ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the halcyon years of the archive (c. 2350-2250 B.C.), the metropolis lured traders from Persia, present-day Turkey, Lebanon, Damascus, Sumer and Egypt. Students journeyed from Mari, Kish and Emar to enroll at the academy, then went back home to practice their craft. The prosperity was partly due to Ebla's agricultural acumen. One tablet records the warehousing of 548,500 measures of barley--enough for 18 million meals. Ebla may also have been the first city in the Near East to supplant bartering with use of gold and silver as currency. The complex government was headed by a king, Malik(u), elected peaceably to a seven-year term. A watchdog senate, the wealthy Ab-bu or "elders," wielded backroom power.

There is far more to be revealed: most of the tablets have yet to be published. Meanwhile the diggers are hard at work in the 1981 season, which concludes next month. Does the mound of Tell Mardikh hold more buried tablets with more disclosures? Do the glory years of Ebla hold the true roots of contemporary Western economics and customs?

The questions are no longer timeless; the answers are emerging from the sands.

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