Talk:Ebla

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ancient Near East Portal This article falls within the scope of the ancient Near East WikiProject. Please participate by editing this article, and help us improve articles to good article standards, or visit the project page.

	Archaeology Portal This article is part of WikiProject Archaeology, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to archaeology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the assessment scale.

	Syria Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Syria, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on Syria on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the Project's quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the Project's importance scale.
	After rating the article, please provide a short summary on the article's ratings summary page to explain your ratings and/or identify the strengths and weaknesses.

Now almost every noun is linked. Why create a link to a name that has no other existence besides its appearance in an inscription at Ebla? Links are meant to be followed for more detailed information. They have no other purpose.Wetman 01:42, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

Well, if nothing else is known except the name, ãgreed -- the link is indeed superfluous. But if something else is known, it is not unlikely that someone will write an article about the guy (Think of all those obscure Tolkien characters...), in which case the link will be useful. I suppose that a really good wikipedia should eventually have an article

"Rabbit-Tim was a king of Ebla in the 3rd millenium BC. Its name is known from only one inscription found in that city's site.
This article is a stub...

In any case the link does not seem to cost much.
All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 22:05, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

As a general rule, not just here, if the entry is littered with dead end "links" and every date is linked, etc then meaningful links, like Sargon of Akkad in this entry, become invisible.Wetman 23:13, 22 May 2004 (UTC)

Wetman, myself I would never have thought of making dates into links; but that is the custom, and I cannot think of a good criterion for linking some dates while leaving others unlinked. So...

As for person names, I thought of two other excuses for creating such "dead" links:

• To signal to other wikipedians "here is an article that ought to be written".
• To provide a surrogate of a subject index, through the "what links here" button.

Please note that Google searching is not a good substitute for subject index, because it often provides too many irrelevant hits, and will miss pages that refer to the concept by an abbreviated or non-standard name. E.g. searching for "John Smith" will not find "two Smiths, Joe and Jack"; but reverse-linking will, if they are linked "two [[Smith family|Smith]]s, [[Joseph Smith|Joe]] and [[John Smith|Jack]]".

Anyway, I agree that moderation, here as everywhere, is a good idea. All the best,
Jorge Stolfi 05:48, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] A "rumor" moved here

"It is rumored that Giovanni Petinato, an epigrapher studying the texts, reported that the names of five famous Biblical cities near the Dead Sea (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, and Bela/Zoar) were mentioned in the Ebla archives (tablet 1860) in the same order as in Genesis 14." It isn't reassuring to see Giovanni Pettinato's name misspelled, but the publication of such "information" must be more encyclopedic than a "rumor." Can anyone confirm this? Is it meaningful? --Wetman 14:05, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Someone needs to write an article on the Ebla Tablets.

I'm not sure there is anything conclusive about mention of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here's a quote from a website (itself quoting Biblical Archaeology Review):

When the archives at ancient Ebla (in present day northern Syria) were first discovered in 1975, the translator, Giovanni Pettinato, reported he had found the names of the 5 cities of the plain were not only listed, but in the same order as in Genesis. However, the Syrian government was "angered at the emphasis placed in the West on the tablets' alleged Biblical significance". (BAR, May/June 1980, p. 48) A rather large controversy then began over these tablets, which the Syrians felt were being used to link the Biblical Patriarchs with Syrian history, something they would not stand for. This finally resulted in Pettinato's resignation and letter of recantation as to many of the translations. The later appointed director of the Italian mission excavating at Ebla issued a statement which shows why Pettinato was forced to recant: "These allegations [linking the Ebla tablets with the Bible] were propagated by Zionist-American centres to be exploited for atrocious purposes aimed at proving the expansionist and colonialistic views of the Zionist leaders." (Ibid., p. 49). When Pattinato, the original translator of the texts, made his recantation, he still insisted that the 2 cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were correct.

- If the original translator of the texts, obviously a man who was considered highly qualified to lead the project until he fell afoul Syrian Judeophobia, says that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were mentioned in the texts, and were listed in the same way that the Scriptural text lists them, then this is not a "rumor" but as authoritative as one can ask for. Treating it as a mere "rumor" because it is displeasing to rabid anti-Zionists (or worse, antisemites), and removing any reference to this highly relevant matter from the article itself, is not academically acceptable. There is a further point to be made, showing to what a degree this Wikipedia article has capitulated to Syrian "anti-Zionism." The Syrian view is that the language of the Ebla archival materials is "Eblaite." This is to avoid admitting that it is in fact a very early form of Hebrew. This can be verified objectively, and is not really a matter of political ideology and should not be distorted by ideology, it is a purely philological matter. If one simply cannot bring oneself to say "Hebrew," for fear of suggesting that Israel and Jews really do have authentic deep historical roots in the region and the Biblical account is substantially correct about Abraham, etc., then at the least one must admit that the language spoken and written in the Ebla empire was "Proto-Canaanitic." But "Eblaite"? Come on. -

-I don't know whether Eblaite is an early form of Hebrew, but you can just forget the Abraham bit, unless you have some tangible contemporary evidence in hand. You can also forget about Jacob, Isaac, Moses, Samson and many others. Maybe, just maybe, starting with David, you are dealing with real people. Thomas Keyes

--Thomas Keyes - Fortunately, the archaeological and historical evidence is against you. DRJ 00:36, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Returning to the subject at hand, the Ebla debate ocasioned by Pettinati's unprofessional character assassination of Alfonso Archi in the journal Pettinati edits, Oriens Antiquus 19 (1980:49-72) and published in an English translation in The Biblical Archaeologist 43 (1980) pp 203-16, was crisply and unconditionally responded to in a joint letter supportive of Archi, dated 30 May 1980, signed by eight members of the International Committee for the Study of Ebla Texts and published in The Biblical Archaologist Summer 1981, p 137. The consensus has been summed up succinctly in a published letter of Prof. A.F. Rainey, Tel Aviv University "The Ebla tablets will shed much light on the history of Syria and the Near East in general. Why prostitute them for false biblical 'parallels'?" (in B.A.R. VI 5 (1980)p. 13. Anyone with JSTOR access can confirm my facts. --Wetman 01:18, 6 February 2007 (UTC)