Books in Brief

004

Ebla: A New Look at History

Giovanni Pettinato, transl. C. Faith Richardson

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 290 pp., including 16 maps and illustrations, 8 tables, $36.95

“Absolutely deluged by a sea of written documents.” That was how author Giovanni Pettinato felt after September 1975. University of Rome excavators, led by Paolo Matthiae, had found thousands of clay tablets in a ruined Early Bronze Age palace in northern Syria. Charged to identify, catalogue and translate them, Pettinato was puzzled. The cuneiform signs resembled familiar Babylonian ones, yet many did not seem to be used in the same way as they were for writing Sumerian in Babylonia. After weeks of study, he concluded that they were being used for writing a West Semitic language, related to Hebrew and Phoenician, which he called paleo-Canaanite. With this key he opened the world of these texts, and that is the world he expounds in his new book, translated from the 1986 Italian edition.

Pettinato begins by describing the excavations, the identification of Tell Mardikh as ancient Ebla on the basis of an inscribed fragment of a statue and the city of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000–1600 B.C.). He then turns to third-millennium Ebla, the topic of the rest of the book. The discovery, description and dating of the archives are dealt with from firsthand experience, and Pettinato communicates the excitement of those events. Concerning the precise date of third-millennium Ebla, the author fairly states divergent scholarly views. The palace was destroyed by fire, presumably by an enemy. Archaeologists link this either with a campaign of Naram-Sin of Akkad, in Babylonia, about 2250 B.C., or with one by his grandfather Sargon in about 2300 B.C. Pettinato argues for 2500 B.C., on epigraphic grounds and other factors, and he suggests that a king of Kish, in Babylonia, or a local revolt, may have brought about the sack of Ebla. This part ends with an account of Ebla’s administration, economics and commerce.

Part two, “The Kingdom of Ebla and the Geographical Map of the Fertile Crescent,” uses the Ebla texts to answer questions about the extent of Ebla’s power and influence. According to Pettinato, its kings had treaties with Assur in Assyria (the treaty text is in the appendix) and close connections with Mari, with Kish and with Hamazi in Iran. Mari, however, was hostile before it was brought under Ebla’s control and its king, Iblul-II, was made a vassal. To the south, Palestinian places were also subject to Ebla, among them Ebal, near Shechem.

Part three, “Ebla’s Cultural Heritage,” concludes with a declaration of Ebla’s importance: Ebla was “the third pole of civilization in the Fertile Crescent.… a center of political power which was able to compete with both Pharaonic Egypt and Sumerian Mesopotamia,” and its language was the lingua franca of the third millennium B.C.

Giovanni Pettinato’s opinions have circulated since his first announcements about the tablets in 1975. His detailed account, The Archives of Ebla: An Empire Inscribed on Clay, appeared in 1981,^a and the present work offers the same views, although painted with a broader brush.

Do we truly have here a “new look at history,” as the subtitle claims? Certainly the Ebla tablets open a new area of history, for they are 500 years older than any other written documents found in northern Syria, a region we previously knew hardly anything about before 2000 B.C. Alas, nearly all scholars now reject almost all the major points of the line of interpretation that Pettinato has followed. Pettinato worked with enormous energy and diligence, providing invaluable initial publications. Once other Assyriologists had access to some tablets, however, they began to disagree with him and to propose very different explanations. As scholars improved their understanding of the ways Ebla’s scribes had used cuneiform signs and Sumerian formulas, the differences grew. In conference papers, essays and monographs, the meaning of the tablets individually and in groups has been explored extensively, and it continues to be examined as more and more tablets are fully published by other experts attached to the Ebla expedition.

These researches confirm Ebla’s role as a major city of ancient Syria, with wide-ranging trade links, under strong influence from Babylonia. At the time of the documents, it 006was a wealthy place where large quantities of raw materials and manufactured goods flowed in and out. Ebla had a well-organized administration, but its rule covered only villages in the neighborhood and perhaps towns a short distance beyond; there was no empire embracing Mari and Palestinian places, nor was there a treaty with Assur. Part of this alternative picture results from more sober identification of placenames found in the tablets. If an Ebal does occur (the reading is not proved), there is no need for it to be the same place as the Biblical Ebal. Two or more places with the same name is a common feature in the ancient Near East, as elsewhere, despite Pettinato’s belief to the contrary.

In his bibliography, the author lists many studies that disagree strongly with his own, without alerting readers to the opposite conclusions reached in them. Thus the eminent German Sumerologist D. O. Edzard’s analysis of the “Bulletin from the Campaign against Mari” gives a conclusion opposed to Pettinato’s: Ebla did not conquer Mari! Most scholars also reject Pettinato’s arguments for a date of about 2500 B.C. for the burning of Ebla’s palace; instead they favor 2300 B.C. or thereabouts.

It was Pettinato’s early statements that provoked eager speculation about Ebla’s connection to the Bible. This had a large place in his earlier book. Here the subject is barely mentioned. The alleged Palestinian place-names and a paragraph about a supposed creation story are the only matters that have a direct relation to the Bible.

Ebla’s tablets bring amazing, unexpected information about early Syria, expanding knowledge of its history, geography, society, economics, languages and religion. Nevertheless, Ebla does not rank beside Egypt and Babylonia as a third center of the ancient world. Much of its visible culture derived from Babylonia, and it was only one of several major Syrian centers. Other major sites, such as Byblos, have yielded less to archaeologists’ spades, and many lie unexcavated (for example, Aleppo), so features currently called Eblaite could well be common to all. While Ebla does bring “a new look at history,” this book exaggerates and, in the reviewer’s opinion, misrepresents it, regrettably stating theories and suppositions as facts, while giving almost no attention to alternatives.^b Reader, beware!

Ebla: A New Look at History

Giovanni Pettinato, transl. C. Faith Richardson

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 290 pp., including 16 maps and illustrations, 8 tables, $36.95