Ebla Palace G Archives

More than 14,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments, recovered largely intact from the collapsed shelving of a single archive room inside the royal palace known as Palace G, at Ebla in northern Syria. Ebla was an independent kingdom, not a Mesopotamian dependency, and its scribes wrote in a distinct East Semitic language, Eblaite, alongside Sumerian, using a cuneiform script adapted from Mesopotamian models. The tablets are organized by subject rather than chronology, as the palace itself stored them, and cover administration and rationing, diplomatic correspondence and treaties with neighboring states, trade in textiles and metals, ritual and offering lists, and bilingual lexical lists pairing Sumerian and Eblaite. Individual object dates and the precise sequence of the archive's growth remain debated, but the corpus as a whole is secure and gives Ebla one of the largest and best-preserved palace archives anywhere in the third-millennium Near East.