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[German version] The texts from palace G in  Ebla (24th cent. BC) are the oldest written records found in North West Syria so far. They reflect a complex linguistic situation: along with the cuneiform script, Sumerian and Akkadian texts from Mesopotamia were also imported, and the local material itself is not homogenous. The Semitic idiom ( Semitic languages) used in local texts (of which the bilingual lexical lists are particularly important), which is closely related to  Akkadian, is called Ebla…

[German version] I. Ancient Orient, Egypt, Old Testament In the ancient Orient, the curse is considered to be a magically effective utterance by which the speaker destroys enemies or objects of their sphere, excludes them from the community or at the very least reduces their vitality. How effective this is depends upon the status of the speaker, the social context and the use of set phrases. There is no evidence of colloquial curses in the Near East and hardly any from Egypt. In the Near East set curse phrases are preserved from the mid 3rd millennium onward i…