Ebla Digital Archives

The database – carried out in the framework of Progetto Sinleqiunnini – is intended to include all texts so far published belonging to the 3rd millennium royal archives of Ebla/Tell Mardikh, the Syrian archaeological site discovered and excavated by the “Italian Archaeological Mission to Syria”, directed by Paolo Matthiae. The text encoding system was originally designed by Giorgio Buccellati (member of the International Committe for the Study of the Ebla Texts) and then slightly modified to make it more suitable to the graphemic features of the Ebla documents.

Transliterations provided in the ARET volumes have been checked against the photographs and a number of corrections and collations from the original tablets have been included in the digital files thanks to the efforts of several scholars, who kindly offered their contribution over a long period of time. The list of contributors includes Alfonso Archi, Maria Giovanna Biga, Marco Bonechi, Amalia Catagnoti, Giovanni Conti, Lucio Milano, Massimo Maiocchi, James Platt and Maria Vittoria Tonietti.

The main purpose for the Ebla Digital Archives database is to offer to scholars and students in the field of Ebla studies an easy manageable research tool for browsing through the documents according to multiple searching criteria and for editing texts or portions of texts according to standard assyriological conventions.