Ebla

Ebla, known today as Tell Mardikh, was one of the earliest kingdoms of Syria, its ruins lying about 55 kilometers southwest of Aleppo in Idlib Governorate. Settlement began around 3500 BC, and the city rose through three successive kingdoms: the first and most powerful from roughly 3000 to 2300 BC, a second from 2300 to 2000 BC, and a third, ending around 1600 BC when Hittite forces destroyed the city. Ebla's discovery overturned assumptions that Bronze Age civilization in the Levant was merely derivative of Egypt and Mesopotamia, revealing an independent center of comparable sophistication. Its central royal palace held an archive of roughly 20,000 cuneiform tablets, dated to about 2500 to 2350 BC and written in Sumerian and the previously unknown Eblaite language, which today illuminate the political structure and daily life of a mid-third-millennium Levantine kingdom.