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Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1981

Are “The Cities of the Plain” Mentioned in the Ebla Tablets?

Cities identified by Pettinato are nowhere near the Dead Sea

By Alfonso Archi

About five years ago, Giovanni Pettinato, the original epigrapher to the Italian Mission to Ebla, announced to the world that the Biblical Cities of the Plain (Genesis 14) were mentioned in the fabulous third-millennium B.C. cuneiform tablets found at Ebla. At the time of his announcement, Pettinato did not tell us the way in which the cities were written, nor did he give us textual references. Only recently has he done this and only for three of the five cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah and Zoar.a Even now, however, he has not attempted to prove his proposed identifications. […]

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Footnotes

1.

See “BAR Interviews Giovanni Pettinato,” BAR 06:05. Once again, in this article, Pettinato launches some unacceptable insults against me. Also the evidence offered in favor of his thesis is insubstantial.

2.

TM. [Tell Mardikh, the modern site name of Ebla] 76. [1976] G. [the excavation area in which the tablet was found; in this case, the royal library] 524 [the number of the tablet].

3.

Obv. [obverse or front of the tablet] IV [the number of the column] 8 [the number of the row] = [indicates a parallel or duplicate passage in another tablet with the number indicated] 2379 rev. [reverse or back of the tablet] I.5.

Endnotes

1.

Pettinato, Catalogo dei testi cuneiformi di Tell Mardikh-Ebla Napoli, 1979, p. 260.

2.

Archi: SEb 1 (1979), p 107f.

3.

In Catalogo, cit., p. 157, the order is a regressive one, and ÙA~-sûu’-mu is wrongly quoted.

4.

See RLA V, s.v.

5.

In Catalogo, cit., Pettinato gives 26 references.

6.

About Emar, see the excavation report by J.-C. Margueron: Syria 52 (1975), pp. 53–85.

7.

About this problem, see P. Fronzaroli: JSS 22 (1977), p. 151f.

8.

About Dubki = Tuba, see P. Matthiae: SEb I (1979),pp.115–118.

9.

See Fronzaroli, CRAA 25, in press.