EblaTexten

EblaTexten is a digital corpus and reference resource dedicated to the Eblaite texts recovered from the ancient city of Ebla (Tell Mardikh) in northern Syria. The collection centers on thousands of clay tablets and fragments discovered during excavations in the 1960s and 1970s, which provide a primary source for the Eblaite language, a Northwest Semitic tongue used in administrative, economic, and diplomatic records dating to the third millennium BCE. EblaTexten aims to make these materials accessible to researchers and educators worldwide by providing standardized transliterations, translations, and metadata.

Content and structure: The corpus includes digitized tablet images, line-by-line transliterations, philological annotations, and multiple-language translations, with a consistent schema for provenance, dating, excavation context, and tablet composition. It uses TEI-compatible markup and a searchable lexicon of Eblaite vocabulary, linked to related Semitic languages. The project encourages community input and integration with other corpora and philological tools.

Access, use, and impact: EblaTexten is designed for open access, with a web interface and an API to support computational research, digital palaeography, and linguistic analysis. By standardizing data formats and providing machine-readable entries, the resource assists linguists, historians, and archaeologists in studying Eblaite grammar, lexicon, and the economic and political networks reflected in the tablets. It also serves as a pedagogical resource for universities and independent scholars.

Governance and scope: The project is coordinated by an international consortium of collaborating institutions. Editorial policy emphasizes transparency, reproducibility, and the gradual incorporation of new tablets and readings as scholarship progresses. EblaTexten supplements published editions and critical studies by offering accessible, machine-readable data and cross-references to related corpora.