The ancient city of Ebla, in northern Syria, was discovered in 1968 by the Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae at Tall Mardikh, a 56-hectare (140-acre) mound south of Aleppo. Excavating the site in 1975, Matthiae unearthed Ebla�s royal archives, a collection of more than 14,000 inscriptions on clay tablets dating from between 2500 and 2200 BC. Written in the cuneiform characters originated by the Sumerians of Mesopotamia and adapted to the language of Ebla�s Semitic inhabitants, they show the city to have been an important commercial centre ruled by a merchant aristocracy with an elected king. They also reveal the existence of a flourishing north Syrian civilization rivalling that of Egypt and Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC.