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.