Publication of the Archives of Ebla: A Report on the Work in Progress

Abstract

The largest group of documents of the Central Archive concerns the incomes and the expendi¬tures of garments and metals of the Central Administration for the last forty-one years, and a small selection of a variety of texts of the previous six years, that is: chancery documents, fields allotments, agricultural production, which in the following years were systematically destroyed. There are also lexical lists, few literary texts and some incantations. The lexical texts have been reconstructed, mostly by several fragments, and a new edition of the Bilingual Lists is in prepara¬tion in a series which will include also the Sumerian lists. A large selection of the different kinds of the administrative documents has been presented in ARET I and II. The following volumes concern instead homogenous groups of texts. All the chancellery documents have been published by P. Fronzaroli and A. Catagnoti. Fronzaroli has also edited the ritual for the royal wedding (ARET XI, XIII, XVI, XVIII). The volumes ARET I, IV, VIII, XV, XIX, and XX are devoted to the monthly expenditures of garments, so that about one third of this documentary group (of about 500 texts) has been published. ARET VII includes a first part of the single registrations of expenditures of metals; a second volume will complete the publication of this corpus totalling about 500 tablets. The annual documents of the incomes of metals and garments (with comple¬mentary documentation for a total of 110 texts) is published in ARET XIV. The edition of the an¬nual documents of expenditures of metals is in preparation. 2050 fragments of tablets (two-thirds of the total) have been edited in ARET III and XII. The documentation concerning the supply of victuals for the Palace were preserved in another archive: the first part of it has been published in ARET IX, and the second part will be edited in ARET X.