How it began
The Ebla tablets come from the palace archives of the ancient city of Ebla, at Tell Mardikh in Syria. They all date to the period between about 2500 BCE and the destruction of the city about 2250 BCE. Estimates suggest the Great Archive originally held between 4,000 and 5,000 tablets. Among them are many tablets with versions of three basic bilingual word lists that set Sumerian words against their equivalents in the local language, now called Eblaite.
Before it existed
Sumerian scribes had developed a writing system that mixed word signs with phonetic signs. Before the Ebla archive was found, modern scholars had no bilingual lists pairing Sumerian with another language, so the pronunciation and other phonetic aspects of Sumerian were unclear.
How it works
Each list pairs a Sumerian term with the Eblaite word. The scribes also kept syllabaries that gave Sumerian words with their pronunciation in Eblaite, shelved separately with the word lists. To write their own language they used a reduced set of cuneiform signs entirely for their sounds, which is described as the earliest example of transcription, that is, rendering sounds in a system invented for another language.
What lasted
The lists have been heralded as the oldest known dictionaries. Because Sumerian was still a living language when they were written, they allowed scholars to clarify how it was pronounced and understood. The phonetic use of a smaller sign set is also seen as a simplifying step that would let literacy spread more widely in palace, temple and merchant settings.
