The archive was kept in orderly fashion in two small rooms off a large audience hall (with a raised dais at one end); one repository contained only bureaucratic economic records on characteristic round tablets, the other, larger room held ritual and literary texts, including pedagogical texts for teaching young scribes.
Many of the tablets had not previously been baked, but when all were preserved by the fire that destroyed the palace, their storage method served to fire them almost as thoroughly as if in a kiln: they had been stored upright in partly recessed wooden shelves, rectos facing outward, leaning backwards at an angle so that the incipit of each tablet could be seen at a glance, and separated from one another by fragments of baked clay.
The tablets provide a wealth of information on Syria and Canaan in the Early Bronze Age,[8] and include the first known references to the "Canaanites", "Ugarit", and "Lebanon".
[4] The archives contain thousands of copybooks, lists for learning relevant jargon, and scratch pads for students, demonstrating that Ebla was a major educational center specializing in the training of scribes.
[9] The sensationalist claims were made by Giovanni Pettinato and were coupled with delays in the publication of the complete texts, and it soon became an unprecedented academic crisis.
[9] However, much of the initial media excitement about supposed Eblaite connections with the Bible, based on preliminary guesses and speculations by Pettinato and others, is now widely deplored as generated by "exceptional and unsubstantiated claims" and "great amounts of disinformation that leaked to the public".