Ebla was a city in northwestern Syria,between present-day Aleppo and Hama, about 140 km from the Mediterranean Sea. It flourished between 2400 and 1600 p.e.v. It was a Semitic city, which began its history almost simultaneously with the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, which in fact destroyed it around 2300 b.e.v. Resources and was destroyed twice more, the last one precisely in about 1600 b.e.v. An Eastern Semitic language, Eblaite, was spoken.
About 17,000 artifacts, including clay tablets and their fragments, written in Paleo-Akkadian and Eblaite using cuneiform writing, have been found from the royal archive at Ebla. The archive dates to the period from 2350 to 2300 B.E.V., according to the official website of the Ebla excavations by Italians from 1970 onward http://www.ebla.it/index.html.
