43/ ww. 2 / 1960 Robert Biggs ¥! Almost five years have passed since the discovery of the roval archives al Tell Mardikh, and the intriguing questions which this remark-® able find has raised still 5 remain. A prominent cunei. ‘| formist takes a fresh but careful look at the issues, the controversies, the publica | tions, and the implications of Ebla and its texts. | ' It happens every few decades that an i z archeological discovery attracts wide- An Interim spread Publicity and popular attention. | Perspective One can think of the sensational I anwar sie, meee anion toed) : i] tablets. More recently, there was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were the archeological sensation of the 1950s. Most of the excitement about these particular finds can be asbuted dey fa concern wih the Bible and the claims that were tmade concerning tein eevance for 3 the Bible. Now Tell Mardikh-Ebla in Syria has been hailed as e diswovery ‘of even greater importance. Again. it is the supposed connections with the Bibl tha have caugh a great dal of - attention and have been reported extensively in the popular press and in religious publications, especially in the United Sintee Because of the wide publicity given the Ebla finds, and exaggera- tions and distortions in some srewopapers and other elements of the 1-| opal pres itmay be well for i | trades ofthis journal fo consider he finds trom dlerentnerspecve in i | the sontet of commen oma new | book about Eola (Bermant and | Weitzman 1979) ‘A great deal has been written on the Ebla texts by persons unfamiliar 10 BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST » SPRING 1980vgn cuneiform writing of the mid-3rd ienniam and who hav migequate appreciation ijaicuties and ambi ll fi have m parallels for the are in fact from ADS than 100 lexical texts perspective ofa scholar who has Pemderable experience in reading seript of the tim: E land who has long been 1 from Ebla and have not discussed them with any members of the Ebla Reading 3rd-Millennium Cuneiform In previous discussions of the Ebla tablets t00 litle emphasis has been puton the difficulty of reading and ding cuneiform texts of the keep in mind the writing and langus means for express IBL ICAI. ARCHEOLOGIS SPRING 1980.77The Near East, showing the relative = locations of Ebla, Fara, Abu Salibikh, and other important ancient sites. recovered solely through an examin- ation of its written remains is very ‘much a matter of the nature and limitations of the writing system. The writing system used for Sumerian was a logo-syllabic one, That is, it consisted of signs for words (logograms) and signs tor sounds which were not necessarily words (syllabograms). In a logo-syllabie system, almost all nouns and verbs fare written with logograms, while syllabograms are used for words like prepositions and conjunctions, for igrammatical snarhers sul ws tH03E __ for gender. number, case, tense, and ‘mood, and for spelling out names and foreign words. By contrast, the adaptation of cuneiform writing to ‘Akkadian was made in the form of a logogram-including syllabic system (much the same way that modern English writing is a logogram- including alphabetic system), where most words were spelled out syllabically and logograms were used ‘mainly as abbreviations for common words. Indications are that the adaptation of cuneiform to the language of Ebla was also of this type. although a very large number of logograms were used in writing, a situation that aly may have beet ue of the earliest Semitie texts from Mesopotamia. This extensive use of logograms means that the words intended in the texts are known to Us through their Sumerian equivalents although the eading ofthe word in Eolaite may ant he Ennwin, Gram matical clement that reate the words to one another in order to form sentences may not be present or, it present ate writin syllabeay in Eblaite. Thus thei meaning can only be guessed at on the bass of comparisons with known words in other Semitic languages It appears in act, that there are no texts written entirely in sylabic Eblate thus, in lnege meature the tents are understandable only tothe extent that the Sumerian logograms can be interpreted The period betore the time of Sargon of Akkad may be divided into three stages in the order of dificulty af undersinnding thr tow. “The Fee Would be represented by the Sumerian texts from Fara, which probably date to around 2600 8. Je went nou Be te ADU Sak texts which date approximately from the same time or posibly abit later Then, probably a itl later. wont come the Ebla tablets Inthe ease of both Fara and Aba Salabikh, there are many signs that we do not yet now how to read: grarmmatiea! elements that co prepositions “to. Usually not writen: in Fara texts the Signs quite often are not written in the sequence in which they should be read, though in ABO Salabikh texts thete is somewhat mare ofa tendency to write the signs in the reading 7% BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGIST | SP.2ING 1980, sequerice of signs 4.EN.G, DU.KI, Tm hich with # sight rearrangement of ™ the signs was read 4-ga-dua EM" and ae ierpreted as“Akkad ofthe king” i (EN's the logosram standine forthe o Eblaite word forking") It was later realized that EN hasaslabie seading rvin Eblatexs. and the signs be area be read regu the ae fe. ofa town (Matthe 1978c: 253), now transcribed by Pettinatoas Arukatu the (Pettinato 1979: 23). tis precise = {his type of refinement in establishing a the normative sylabary that has led M to corrections in reading names in the B Fhis torte cach a the suppored third a and fourth cities ofthe “ities of the ot plain.” “ As or understanding the Ebla th texts. one would think that economic ° and administrative documents should be relatively easy to understand. This th is only partly so for often. even if & ‘one understands every Word ina text . one sill does not know its real ® purpose. On soften reduced co x ‘ying “document concerning barky” : and not being able to say whether the