FROM
SYRIA
SENSATIONAL NEW COLLECTION OF TABLETS FOUND

Beneath a dusty, sun-baked mound in northern Syria, Italian archaeologists have uncovered one of the most spectacular finds of all time — a collection of 15,000 clay tablets from a civilization that flourished over 4, 000 years ago. That kingdom was Ebla, a Semitic civilization which was previously known only by occasional references in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and Egyptian texts. The site of the discovery is Tell Mardikh, 30 miles south of the Syrian town of Aleppo. Paolo Matthiae and Giovanni Pettinato of the University of Rome are directing the excavation.

Bible Names and Cities Mentioned in Tablets

Inscriptions on the tablets seemed to establish both the existence and the exact site of Ebla and that, in itself, was exciting to the archaeologists. But as they began scanning some of the tablets, that excitement soon grew to a feeling bordering on delirium. For

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Cross marks the location of Tell Mardikh, site of the ancient kingdom of Ebla.

inscribed on the tablets, in a mix of logograms — symbols that represent a whole word or concept, as “$” stands for the word “dollar” — and syllabic units spelling out Eblaic words, are names such as ab-ra-mu (Abraham), e-sa-u (Esau), da-u-dum (David), sa-ʾu-lum (Saul), mi-ka-ilu (Michael), is-ra-ilu (Israel) and ib-rum (Eber). Eber is listed in the Bible as the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Abraham (Genesis 11:14–26) and is regarded by some as the individual from whom the Hebrew people derived their tribal name.

The tablets contain references to the cities of Hazor, Megiddo and Gaza — all familiar to students of the Bible. But the most startling reference is to “urusalima”, which is unmistakably Jerusalem. This mention predates any other known reference to the famous city by about 1, 000 years.

The tablets also include stories recounting a great flood and the creation of the world. Both accounts correspond to Noah’s deluge and the record in the Old Testament of the world’s beginnings.

David Freedman, a University of Michigan biblical scholar, the current president of the Society of Biblical Literature and a widely regarded expert in this field, was so intrigued by the first reports of Tell Mardikh that he traveled to Rome to talk to Matthiae and Pettinato personally.

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On his return from Rome, Freedman enthusiastically commented, “Previous reports and rumors do not begin to indicate the true dimensions of the discovery and its importance for ancient Near Eastern and biblical studies. A new chapter in the Near East has been opened, and it will not be closed for some time.”

The Tell Mardikh evidence clearly shows that a major Canaanite empire flourished in that part of the world between the 26th and 23rd centuries before Christ. The Canaanites were a people who occupied what is today Israel, Lebanon and western Syria. Scholars usually describe them as “urban” and “sophisticated” and credit them with having developed the form of writing that eventually became the alphabet. (See Bible and Spade, Autumn 1974, pp. 98 and 99).

It is known that the Canaanites were in control of that part of the Near East around the 20th century B.C., when a nomadic people known as the Hebrews wandered into that land. As they had with other peoples and cultures, the Canaanites accepted the Hebrews into their midst and eventually assimilated them into the Canaanite culture.

The Tell Mardikh tablets will, in all probability, cast a bright new light on the early history of the Hebrews. “We may say at this early stage of investigation,” Freedman declared, “that the new discoveries should tell us much about the background and origin of the people who later became Israel. Without making rash claims or jumping to unwarranted conclusions, we can say that the new tablets will make a very important indirect contribution to the understanding of the Scriptures, and there may prove to be some more direct connections, though here we must be more cautious.”

Tablets Found in Ancient Palace

The story of Tell Mardikh goes back to 1964, when Italian archaeologists began excavating there. They were drawn to this particular “tell,” or mound, because of its fairly large size — about 50 feet high at its highest point and covering an area of 140 acres — and because a sculptured stone basin and clay fragments dated from the 25th to 15th centuries B.C. already had been found there.

The first few seasons of digging revealed a town that had occupied the site between the 20th and 16th centuries B.C. Then, in 1968, the diggers found a statue with an inscription bearing the name of a king of Ebla. This and other evidence indicated that the town of Ebla had, finally, been located. This finding did not cause much of a stir even within the community of biblical archaeologists, for no one had any

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idea of Ebla’s importance in Near Eastern history; as a matter of fact, few textbooks even mention it.

Then, in 1973, as the Italians continued to dig deeper into Tell Mardikh, they discovered an even older town beneath the first one. They tentatively assigned the era of this older town to the so-called Third Millennium B.C., the 1,000-year span from 3,000 to 2, 000 B.C. Among the ruins of the older town they found the first few dozen specimens of what soon was to become a flood of inscribed clay tablets. Those initial tablets, 42 in number, were found to correspond to the era of Sargon the Great, one of the earliest and mightiest of the empire builders of Mesopotamia who lived and ruled around the 24th century B.C.

In 1975, the excavators came upon the outer sections of a palace. In two rooms flanking the entrance to the palace proper, which remains to be excavated, the Italians found the lode of more than 15,000 tablets. Shelves lined three walls of each antechamber and were fitted with dividers, so that the tablets could be stacked on edge for economy and convenience of retrieval.

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Trade Agreements, Ancient Detente and Law Codes

Freedman said that about 10,500 of the 15,000 or so tablets have been categorized so far and the largest single category deals with economic matters. “Many of the texts relate to trade in textiles,” Freedman reported, “which seems to have been the special business of the royal palace.” Some tablets dealt with trade agreements with various city-states, including a consignment of goods to “Sargon, the king of Agade (Akkad).” “There is no question,” the Michigan scholar declared, “but that this is the great Sargon of Akkad (ca. 2360-2310 B.C.) and a firm synchronism (time link) is thus established between Sargon and two kings of Ebla.”

The great king of Ebla was then apparently “Ibrum” whom the Hebrews called “Eber” (Genesis 10:24, 25; 11:14–17). There is the tantalizing suggestion, Freedman said, “that the biblical genealogy and tradition go back to this king, though there is no other evidence than the identity of the name.” Sargon’s reign seems to have overlapped that of Ibrum and of Ibrum’s father, Risi, who is the second of the two kings referred to above.

But with the death of Sargon, Ibrum reversed the relationship between his kingdom and Akkad and established Ebla as the dominant of the two empires — a dominance that extended in space as well as in time. Under Ibrum’s sovereignty, Ebla controlled the territory from Egypt to the south, to the Persian Gulf on the southeast and to the middle of present-day Turkey on the north. This sway held for much of four centuries, apparently.

“Hundreds of place names are recorded in the economic and diplomatic texts,” Freedman noted. Of special importance is one tablet with a list of vassal states which then were paying tribute to the king of Ebla.

One large tablet is the record of an ancient detente between Ebla and Assur (Assyria), spelling out in 22 separate articles the details of the treaty between the two kings. (A complete translation has not yet been worked out.)

Two tablets deal with case law. One of these concerns damages to be awarded to injured parties; the pain of a blow inflicted by a hand, without a weapon, was worth five lambs while an injury caused by a weapon was redeemed by the payment of 50 cattle.

The other tablet concerned illicit sexual relations with unmarried females. The code provided that if a man had intercourse with a single woman who was not a virgin at the time of the act, then he had to pay an unspecified fine to her father or guardian. If the woman was a virgin, or claimed to be, prior to the act, then the man

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went on trial. If the trial determined that the woman was forced to engage in sex against her will — in short, was raped — then the man was adjudged to be guilty and sentenced to death.

“There are obvious similarities and differences in comparison with other codes,” Freedman said, “including those of the Bible. But we have (in these tablets) the first Canaanite code.”

Religious Tablets Also Found

Many of the tablets have religious connotations. The mythological, cultic and ritual texts (such as incantations and spells) found on a number of the tablets should, said Freedman, “Provide us with background information on the religion which the Israelites opposed so vehemently.”

The gods of Ebla included both Sumerian and various Semitic figures. The chief god appears to have been Dagon, who was represented as having the body of a fish but the head and hands of a man; he is thought to have been the god of agriculture. Dagon also shows up in the Old Testament and, in fact, it was the Philistine temple of Dagon that Samson barehandedly toppled at Gaza. (See Bible and Spade, Spring 1974, pp. 50-54). Other gods mentioned in the tablets are Baal, Ishtar and Chemosh — deities also mentioned in the Bible. King Solomon once introduced the worship of Chemosh into Jerusalem, just to placate one of his foreign wives (1 Kings 11:7).

Freedman and other scholars have been electrified by the parallels between the language of the tablets and the language of the ancient Hebrews. Eblaite, as Freedman refers to the language, seems to be a West Semitic form unlike Sumerian, Akkadian or any of the other ancient languages known to modern scholars. Fortunately, the excavators have found a bilingual vocabulary list of about 1,000 words in both Sumerian logograms and Eblaic syllabic writing. Like the Rosetta stone that enabled Egyptologists to decipher hieroglyphics, this vocabulary list should permit scholars to deduce the meaning of all the Tell Mardikh tablets.

The tablets, with their names and stories, are perhaps closer to the Old Testament than anything that has yet been found. The names are particularly striking. “Many, if not most, of the important names in the Bible have already been identified and very often in almost identical form,” Freedman stated. “If the patriarchs and their descendants did not actually live in Ebla1 , they clearly belonged to

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the same cultural tradition and came from the area in which that tradition survived.”

The Future of Tell Mardikh

As for the future of Tell Mardikh, there is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that “pot-hunters” — the professional archaeologists’ scathing term for those who raid sites and steal valuable artifacts — may descend on the site and begin plundering it. Freedman said that he had heard rumors that some tablets are already beginning to show up on the European antiquities black market. He expressed the hope that both funds and international safeguards may be found to prevent the valuable tablets from escaping, in ones and twos and batches, into the hands of private collectors.

The good news is that the best may be yet to come. “It should be noted,” Freedman observed, “that this collection of tablets is not from the royal archives, in all likelihood, but is a miscellany of records kept near the central court where provisions were stored, where tribute was collected, perhaps most important, it was where apprentice scribes did their lessons, copying texts of all kinds as part of their training.”

Since the main body of the palace has not yet been uncovered, Freedman and others hope that a treasure trove of tablets is still to be found beneath the soil of Tell Mardikh. “Should the royal archive be found intact,” he said, “there is no way to calculate either the size or the importance of such a collection, but in view of what has turned up in an adjunct repository, the possibilities stagger the imagination.”

As additional information becomes available, we look forward to carrying further reports on this amazing find in future issues of Bible and Spade.

(Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1976)

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