The Official “DECLARATION” Submitted by Chief Ebla Epigrapher Giovanni Pettinato at Request of Head of Syrian Antiquities Department

The undersigned, Professor Giovanni Pettinato, a philologist of the Italian Archaeological Mission from the University of Rome, officially declares the following:

The documents laid open in Tell Mardikh (= Ebla) during the excavation campaigns of 1974 to 1967 [1976], that I have had the honour to decipher and study, always give us more evidence of the central role of Syria in the history of the third millenary, together for the entirely original historical implications and for the presence of a new semitic language, the most ancient one among those already known.