The diffusion of cuneiform writing in Syria in the Third Millennium BC

The archives of tablets with cuneiform signs found in the city of Tell Mardikh, ancient Ebla, 60 kms south-west of Aleppo, between 1974 and 1976, proved that cuneiform writing, ideated by Sumerians to write their language, had already spread from Mesopotamia to north-west Syria in the third millennium BC. The tablets from Ebla revealed a new language, called Eblaite after the site in which it is documented. It was probably the language of much of Syria but, so far, the archives of Ebla are the only ones that have been discovered in the region. When the tablets were discovered, it was necessary to understand the type of language in which they were written and the type of syllabary, that is whether each sign was to be read as a logogram or as a syllabic value. Thanks to the first epigraphist, G. Pettinato, the syllabary in use by Eblaite scribes was reconstructed in a relatively short time. Pettinato realized that the writing was similar to that of the tablets from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Shuruppak, modern Fara, in Iraq. He also realized that several lexical texts from the archive of Ebla were duplicates of those of Shuruppak and of Abū Ṣalābīkḫ, another Mesopotamian center not too far from Shuruppak. However, the texts from Shuruppak and those from Abū Ṣalābīkḫ were written around 200 years before those of Ebla. It is probable that Eblaites learned cuneiform writing from the scribes of the city of Kish in central-south Mesopotamia, and from those of the city of Mari, on the middle Euphrates. Journeys of scribes from Mari and Kish to Ebla are documented by the texts. Possibly, they arrived with lexical tablets that their Eblaite colleagues copied and studied. In any case, Eblaite scribes used Sumerian terms (words) not known from other Sumerian texts. They can be understood only by studying the context. The syllabary has almost been determined but a broad and in-depth study of the Ebla writing system based on the complete corpus is still a desideratum.