Ricerc@Sapienza

The archives of tablets with cuneiform signs found in the city of Tell Mardikh, ancient Ebla, 60 kms south-west of Aleppo, between 1974 and 1976, proved that cuneiform writing, ideated by Sumerians to write their language, had already spread from Mesopotamia to north-west Syria in the third millennium BC. The tablets from Ebla revealed a new language, called Eblaite after the site in which it

In the colophons of some Hittite texts of the late 13. century BC, the name of the scribe occurs sometimes in the formulas (ŠU) NP (...) (ANA) PANI NP (...) IŠṬUR. The formula with the simple PANI NP attests that the text has been examined and approved by an authority, the so called ‘supervisor’, above all regarding its conformity to the original, but not that he was present in the writing process. The formula ANA PANI NP instead attests that the scribe worked ‘in the presence of’ an authority really present as witness