![]() ![]() Some of these city civil servants, including scribes and archivists, carried out their responsibilities in the royal palace, a three-story structure, which contained the archival repositories. Another 4,700 civil servants worked in Ebla for the two city governors and the top civil servant. The day-to-day administrative work of the empire was accomplished by some 7,000 civil servants who worked for the regional governors. The top civil servant of the empire was also elected for a seven-year term, and like the king, could be re-elected. Two of these governors divided the responsibility for administering affairs in the city of Ebla itself. Executive power resided in bodies of elders and ex-kings, as well as in the hands of fourteen regional governors, who oversaw the administration of affairs in the fourteen regions of the empire. The Eblaite empire was ruled by a king, who was elected for a seven-year term, and his royal family. Ebla, unlike other Sumerian city-states, was essentially a secular society, and a sharp distinction was maintained between political and religious life. When peaceful means did not suffice, Ebla hired mercenary military forces to fight its battles, not having its own army. Many of the translated treaty tablets indicate that the Eblaites expended considerable energy to ensure, by peaceful means-such as dynastic marriages-the safety of their commercial routes. It was a major export-import center, specializing in textiles and metals, with an economic zone of influence encompassing most of the Fertile Crescent. The business of Ebla was business, and the Eblaite empire was primarily an economic-cultural one, not a military one. ![]() The city of Ebla, comprising 140 acres, was populated by upwards of 40,000 people, of whom 10 percent were civil servants. a flourishing city-state, with an empire that was populated by over 250,000 people in hundreds of towns and villages. ![]() The discovery of Ebla and its tablets has forced scholars to begin rewriting the history of the Near East, giving Ebla its place alongside Ur, Uruk, Kish, and Lagash, as an important third millennium cultural and economic center.Įbla was by 2500 b.c.e. Most scholars, however, doubted this, believing northern Syria in the third millennium to have been an arid semi-desert, inhabited only by wandering tribes of nomads. Some scholars, based on the few references to it, believed Ebla may have been a great kingdom and commercial center. īefore 1964, when Ebla was first discovered, it was just a name in several Mesopotamian texts, its exact location and importance unknown. Scholars have learned from these tablets and other archaeological evidence that Ebla, which is 150 miles northeast of Beirut and fifty miles east of the Mediterranean, was the capital city of a Sumerian empire in north central Syria that had been founded in about 2900 b.c.e., and had flourished in the latter part of the third millennium b.c.e. Subsequent work during the next three years resulted in the uncovering of some 20,000 clay tablets and their identification as the royal archives of Ebla. Ebla Discoveredĭuring the summer of 1974, archaeologists at the excavation of the largest tell in Syria, Tell Mardikh, in the process of removing debris from an ancient Sumerian palace, discovered forty-two clay tablets that appeared to be part of a palace archives. Greg Bradsher, Senior Archivist at the National Archives at College Park, MD. ![]()
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