Fashionable Outfits: Assessing the Socio-historical Value of Textile Sets at Ebla through Textual Pattern Recognition

In this paper, I would like to offer some preliminary considerations on the sets of garments and/or cloths appearing in the administrative record of Great Archive L.2769. Pattern recognition applied to the formulaic language adopted by the scribes provides reliable quantitative and qualitative data on the composition, frequency, and distribution of such deliveries. N-grams (i.e. sequences of n elements, which can be either words or characters) are extremely helpful to identify accounting models: these, in turn, are plentiful in the administrative record due to a highly standardized use of language.