G. Herbert Livingston
Through the skills of many archaeologists, over the past century and a half, remarkable information about ancient civilizations has come to light. Interestingly, some notable discoveries were accidently made by natives or by tourists.
Among the most significant finds have been inscriptions on various materials: stone, clay, wood, and papyrus being most commonly used. Some artifacts bearing writing were found above ground or near the surface. The exact location of most of these artifacts is usually unknown; but in general, they have been found in the Mesopotamian Valley, in Turkey, along the Mediterranean eastern coast and in Egypt.
Some discoveries have yielded accumulations of inscriptions in sufficient numbers to be designated as archives. The oldest of these archives was found at Ebla in the northwest corner of Syria almost two decades ago, and is the subject of this article.
In 1963 a young Italian archaeologist, Paulo Matthiae, examined ancient Syrian mounds, seeking one that offered the greatest challenge; and hopefully, the most information.
Tablets found in the library. They had been on the shelves pictured on page 93 which burned, then collapsed leaving them in this pile.
George Herbert Livingston earned his Ph.D. at Drew University, and is now Prof. of O.T. Emeritus at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore KY. His fruitful career has included participation in excavations at Ramat Rachel, Et-Tell, and Tell Qasile, all in Israel.
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Paulo mattiae, head of the Italian Archaeological Mission to syria, standing in the city gate of Ebla. Behind him, on the acropolis, stood the Palace in which the tablets were found.
Northwestern Syria is dotted with many mounds, hiding the ruins of ancient cities. One impressive mound, near a modern highway between Damascus and Turkey, covered about 140 acres. It is known by the Arabic name, Tell Mardikh, but until positively identified in the mid 1970’s, it lacked a known ancient name.
In 1955 a farmer, while plowing found a large stone object shaped somewhat like a double basin or trough. On its sides were carved humans and lions, which stirred much interest. Matthiae and his party noted on the mound many pieces (sherds) of pottery, dating from about 3500 BC to about AD 600. The decision was made to begin an excavation program the next year. The task would be formidable, because the depth of debris would turn out to be as much as fifty feet deep in the middle of the large mound. From 1964 to 1968, many structures were uncovered and many artifacts
The library of clay tablets was originally on shelves like these before the palace was burned.
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found, but none were of outstanding significance. The first break came in 1968, when a headless stone statue was dug up. It bore an inscription of cuneiform symbols. Dr. Giovanni Pettinato, a professor at the University of Rome, was brought in to translate the inscription. He determined that the statue was dedicated to the goddess Ishtar by Ibbit-lum, ruler of Ebla, and that it should be dated about 2000 BC.
The inscription implied that the city buried in the earth was ancient Ebla, a name which had previously been mentioned about 60 times on inscriptions found in the lower Mesopotamian Valley (now controlled by Iraq), in Turkey, Syria and Egypt. One inscription claimed that Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 BC) had gained control of Ebla and the territory round about. A sucessor of Sargon, Naram-Sin (2254–2218 BC) boasted in an inscription that he had destroyed Ebla. The problem was that scholars could not determine where Ebla was located, though evidence seemed to point to the region northwest of the lower Mesopotamian Valley. The problem was not fully solved until thousands of clay tablets were found in 1974,1975 and 1976. The inscriptions written on them proved that the site was indeed Ebla.
Statue with Ibri-lim’s name in cuneiform
Though settlement of Ebla began about 3500 BC and continued into the seventh century AD, archaeologists had to remove first the remains of the last settlement and dig down through successively older ruins, until they hit bedrock or undisturbed soil. This means that almost a decade passed before Paulo Matthiae and his teams reached the strata of debris which preserved the remains of Ebla’s Golden Age (2500/2400–2250 BC) and its archive of inscribed clay tablets.
Ancient Tel Mardikh (Ebla) looking south
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Matthiae previously had excavated the remains of Ebla’s Silver Age (2000–1600 BC), the time of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
The first exciting discovery of 42 clay tablets occurred in 1974. The team of archaeologists and native workers were uncovering the ruins of a palace used during Ebla’s Golden Age, when workers in room labelled L. 2586, found tablets which had been hardened by a fire that destroyed the palace about 2250 BC. The tablets were scattered over the floor near a buried jar.
In 1975, over 1000 tablets were found in room L. 2712 and more than 14,000 in room L. 2769. All were hardened and discolored by fire. These tablets had originally been stored on wooden shelves, according to subject matter. Many had titles inscribed on an edge of the tablet (colophons), much like modern books.
In 1976, more than 600 were found in room L. 2764 and about 20 tablets in L. 2752, the Audience Room. In room L.2875, a jar full of bone styluses, stone scrapers and some clay was found. They seem to be the writing materials and instruments of the scribes who wrote on the tablets.
Most tablets were flat slabs of clay about 12 inches square, with as many as 3000 lines each. A transliteration of the symbols on one slab into our kind of letters would fill 50 pages of 30 lines per page. Some tablets have the size and shape of a hamburger and others were as small as one inch square. Approximately 7000 of the tablets are fully or almost complete, and the rest are fragments of all sizes. All these tablets are considered by scholars to have been inscribed between 2400 and 2250 BC. Pettinato suggests some may have been written as early as 2500 BC.
Pictures of several thousand tablets, with transliterations and translations have been published, but the pictures and contents of many tablets are still unavailable. However, there has been an unusual amount of turbulent controversy associated with the deciphering of the inscribed symbols. The arguments have centered about how to transliterate them (i.e. how to represent the values of the symbols in our kinds of letters), and especially how to translate them. Dr. Pettinato was the first to do this work and has published several books containing
Detail of tablet written in Eblaite cuneiform.
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the results of his research. Though he is an expert in this field of study, his proposed readings of symbols inscribed on the tablets published have been severely criticized. Sometimes he has yielded to his critics and accepted their corrections, but on many points he has staunchly held his ground in his most recent publications. Much of the interchange has been marked by unscholarly bitterness and acrimony.
There are several reasons for this unpleasant controversy. Besides personality conflicts and professional pride (even the best of scholars possess these traits), the intensity of the controversy has a legitimate basis. The first reason is the difficulty of understanding fully the language of the Sumerian people and grasping the full meaning of the symbols they used when their scribes put their thoughts into inscribed forms.
I have never taken academic courses in Sumerian and must rely on what I have read in articles and books produced by those who have become skilled in this area of study. You may want to enlarge your knowledge by doing the same. I will limit myself here to a simplified summary.
Little is known about the Sumerians who settled in the Mesopotamian Valley about 3500 BC and controlled the area for a 1000 years. They slowly developed a system of recording their thoughts by drawing simple pictures of parts of the body, whether of people or animals, and of various objects. They drew these pictures on moulded clay of various shapes. Fortunately, many of these clay tablets were preserved in the ruins of many cities.
Palace G consists of two rooms of the NW Wing; a courtyard; the Audience Court; the tower enclosing the Ceremonial Staircase; the guard rooms; the Monumental Gateway; and the Administrative Quarter.
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Tablets were found in Room L 2586 (42), Store Room L 2712 (1000), and Library L 2769 (14,000).
Stairway leading from the audience court to the interior of the palace and the Monumental Gateway (see diagram below).
The Sumerian language was spoken until about 2000 BC, when it became a dead, classical language. Scholars have found the language to be unlike any other (although Finnish and Hungarian have some affinity to it). Helpfully, the Babylonians, Assyrians and others studied the language and preserved the meanings and sounds of many Sumerian words in their own literature. Much of the language remains beyond present knowledge.
The pictures the Sumerians drew, and later impressed on clay tablets, basically did not represent words, sounds, nor the parts of speech, verbal tenses, modifiers or other structures of speech. They simply represented ideas, so are called ideograms. For example, a drawing of the lower leg, including the foot, could
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be understood as walking, standing, going, coming, climbing, etc. The Sumerian seeing this symbol would associate it with other symbols and ideas and verbally add to it the above mentioned structures of his language. Thus he could read it to himself or to others in a way that made sense. Conveniently, a person who spoke another language, properly trained in the ideas represented by a series of drawn symbols, could read the inscription in the sounds and grammar of his own language, and read to others.
When Sumerian teachers went to Ebla to set up writing schools, they had devised the cuneiform method of putting their symbols on clay. This method used wedge-shaped marks impressed on soft clay with a stick called a stylus.
These teachers taught students in Ebla the idea associated with each Sumerian ideogram, and the words or phrases that best expressed these ideas in the semitic language used in Ebla. Many bilingual dictionaries were found in the Ebla archive. Well over a thousand Sumerian ideograms were defined by equivalent Eblaite words and phrases written in cuneiform symbols representing syllables. This feature has been very helpful, but not all the Sumerian ideograms used in the inscriptions (they amount to about 80% of the total symbols) appear in the dictionaries found at Ebla, nor in the bilingual dictionaries used by the later Accadians, Assyrians or Babylonians.
All this leads to another reason for the controversy. The mystery of the meaning of many Sumerian symbols, and the fact that some ideograms do not limit themselves to simple ideas but also can branch out to somewhat related ideas, makes it possible for scholars to disagree sharply.
A third reason is, the language the Eblaites spoke and wrote is a hitherto unknown dialect of the semitic family of languages. Knowing other such languages has been useful, yet much more careful research is needed to clarify puzzling aspects of the language of Ebla.
What kinds of literature are found in this archive? There are four kinds represented in the texts: 1) Economic and administrative records of trade (most of the texts are of this type); 2) Dictionaries which number about 250; 3) Government documents such as treaties, letters, laws; 4) Religious literature found on about 150 tablets.
Many details in the first three categories provide fuel for heated arguments. The spelling of place names and the location of cities, towns and regions cited are matters often discussed. In Pettinato’s early publications about Ebla, he had claimed that Sodom, Gomorrah, Gaza and other cities mentioned in the Old Testament occurred on various texts. This claim was hotly challenged and in Pettinato’s book Ebla: A New Look at History published in 1991, the names Sodom and Gomorrah are not mentioned, though he still holds his ground on Aphek, Ashdod, Dor, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, Samaria, Shechem, Maroth and Hazor (p. 125).
The same is true of personal names. Pettinato has conceded he had misread the text in some cases, but he has held firm on others that are hotly contested.
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This is especially true of personal names that also occur in the Bible.
In Pettinato’s early reports on Ebla, he stated that more than 10,000 names had been found in the texts, but only a few thousand were published. Among those published were the names: Adam, Eve, Jubal, Noah, Abram, Ishmael, Hagar, Keturah, Bilhah, Israel, Micah, Michael, Saul and David. None of these people were Biblical people. Rather, their names were like those borne by Biblical people and used long before many Biblical people existed. Pettinato cautiously suggested that the name of one ruler of Ebla, Ebrium, looked much like the Biblical name, Eber. He does not mention these names, except Ebrium (with no reference to Eber) in his latest book.
Pettinato has not backed down on one assertion he made at the beginning, namely, that the names that end with “el”: Ishmael, Israel and Michael, were written differently from the reign of Ebrium on. He still claims Ishmael had the new spelling Ishmaya; Israel, Israya and Michael, Michaya. A number of non-Biblical names also changed the same way. In semitic languages “el” or “il” mean “god;” and “ya” or “ia” (in English, this “i” changes to “y” or to “j”) would be a short form of “yau.” The latter suggests the Old Testament Yah or Yahweh, which is translated as “LORD,” a title for God. This suggestion has created much anger, with vigorous efforts to discredit the equation: “el” and “ya” both refer to God.
The opposition is based on the fact that Pettinato transliterates this symbol as “ia” or “ya.” Other values in cuneiform texts found elsewhere than Ebla are transliterated as “i,” “li,” or “ni,” which may represent the first personal pronoun, either singular or plural; or, the value of a diminutive (i.e. Michael becomes Michie; John becomes Johnnie), which can also be represented by the adjective “little” (i.e., little Michael or little John).
Early on, Pettinato had claimed he had found the name Joram which in the text was preceded by a Sumerian ideogram that indicated a divine name was involved. Pettinato asserted that this showed “jo” (variants would be “yo,” “ya,” or “ia”) was the short form of the word, LORD; the name would mean “The LORD is exalted.” Compare Joram and Jehoram in the books of 1 and 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. Critics responded that “jo” should be “ni” and understood as equivalent to the first person pronoun. They also declared the ideogram Pettinato thought was an indicator of the divine identity of the following syllable or word was actually the word for God. The substitute translation would be, “My God is exalted.”
In Pettinato’s recent book, pp. 179, 180, he steadfastly holds to his position that “el” and “ya” both mean “God,” i.e., Michael means “Who is like God?” and Michaya means “Who is like YA (the LORD)?” In my opinion, this makes more sense than the name being changed to mean “Little Michael” or “Who is like me?” It is interesting that the word Joram is not referred to in the above mentioned book. Nor does Pettinato include the Creation Hymn, recorded on at least three tablets, and translated in an earlier article by Pettinato. It was short
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and much like, in thought at least, Genesis chapter one.
The first line, “Lord of heaven and earth” has not been rejected by critics Professor Edzard, of Germany has proposed the translation of several other lines thus:. .. “you do not./ As on (the) earth (?) like a father, /You don’t let the orphan live a life bound by debt (?)” Obviously, this translation does away with the concept of creation out of nothing that Pettinato believed was clearly stated in the text.
Several observations of a general nature can be made about the archive of Ebla. First, we now know that the language of Ebla was semitic with some kind of ancestral relationship with later semitic languages, including Biblical Hebrew. The personal names mentioned above at least show that they were used as much as 300 years before the time of Abraham. Secondly, the archive reveals an advanced civilization, previously unknown, was active in an area just west of Harran where Abraham and his family settled and lived for a period of time. The content of the tablets reveal aspects of the political, social, economic, and religious ideas and practices of the region. This information should help students of the Patriarchs to understand their thoughts and practices better. Though a rebuilt Ebla existed while the Patriarchs were living, its ruins have not yet provided clay tablets. Nevertheless, the many artifacts found in them could be helpful in throwing light on the material possessions and the burial practices of the Patriarchs.
I had a sense of shock when I read at the end of a review of Pettinato’s recent book by Allen Millard in a recent issue of Bible Review (May/June 1992) the warning “Reader, beware!”
Would it not have been better for the final statement to read as follows: “Readers be patient. Many aspects of the inscriptions are difficult to figure out. The meanings of many symbols are either unknown, ambiguous, can be translated and interpreted in various ways, or are limited in information about a period of history only partially understood at the present time. Differences of opinion among competent scholars will be obvious, but research will continue, more inscriptions will be found. Some problems will be solved, some will not.”
For Further Reading:
The Associates for Biblical Research publication Readings from Bible and Spade and Archaeology and Biblical Research on the Period of the Early Patriarchs (Early Bronze Age) has five excellent articles on the discoveries at Ebla and the implications for Biblical studies. It also has six articles on discoveries at Sodom and Gomorrah and several more articles on pre-Flood people and on Flood accounts in cuneiform literature. Readings is available from ABR for $20.00 plus $2.00 postage and handling.
We also recommend the purchase of a set of 30+ back issues of Bible and Spade (some issues are out of print). These sets are $29 including postage and handling. See back cover for articles and issues available in Archaeology and Biblical Research.
Dr. William Shea in correspondence with ABR on this subject refers to his Ebla Geographical article in the Freedman festschrift when he says, “Pettinato has not revoked or withdrawn any of his readings for this text and the name of Sa-dam is perfectly clear in the photographs. The problem is that peope are talking about other texts besides this one and not paying attention to where the real action is – witness Millard’s article in Bible Review where he completely missed my article on this subject.” (Letter of July 10, 1992)