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The fact that it was in Syria that the tremendous human adventure of settlement began, which took place
around 8,500 B.C., is an excellent reason to visit this country. A Neolithic village was recently unearthed in
the middle Euphrates Valley, in what is today flooded by lake Al Assad (this artificial lake will help reclaim
land from the desert).
This operation began in 1968 with a comprehensive study and rescue campaign sponsored by Unesco. Since time immemorial,
this land, steeped in history, has witnessed the tides of civilizations which fertilized it. The museums of Damascus
and Aleppo, in particular, have benefited from the archeological excavations carried out in 1929 at Ras Shamra
(Ugarit), north of Port Latakia under the supervision of Claude Schaeffer; since 1933 at Tell Hariri (Mari), near
the Euphrates, under the supervision of Andre Parrot and since 1964 at Tell Mardikh (Ebia), where professor Paolo
Matthiae, of Rome University, discovered the remains of a city which was to reveal itself as the most extraordinary
post-war discovery in the Near-East. Its library, unearthed in 1975, contained some fifteen thousand tablets written
in cuneiform Sumerian signs, transcribing a heretofore unknown Semitic language, the Eblaite.
Other imprints appeared on Syrian soil; they were numerous and often in conflict with each other. The influence
of the Hittites, for example, was enormous in the Middle Euphrates Valley from the mid-second millenary B.C. Rescue
excavations before flooding the resevoir of the El Assad Dam enabled the discovery at Meskeneh-Qadimeh of an extraordinary
« tablet-house » (i.e. library), dating back to the 13th century B.C., of a certain Baal-Malik: «
Scribe and Astrologer of all Gods of the city of Emar». This astonishing finding revealed to us, that the
people living in Emar were using a language in many ways related to Arabic
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