Word: digging
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tablets in The Archives of Ebla (Doubleday; $15.95) by Giovanni Pettinato, the team member originally in charge of deciphering the ancient inscriptions. The book is translated from Italian, as was an earlier 1981 title, Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered (Doubleday; $14.95), an overview by Paolo Matthiae, head of the Ebla dig. Pettinato's translation of the creation hymn sharpens a question that has already tantalized laymen and provoked squabbles among the experts: Do these tablets have any bearing on the Bible...
...Amorite, and thus distant from Hebrew, believes that the discoveries at Ebla add "nothing directly to biblical scholarship." But Pettinato, who first deciphered Eblaite, considers it an early Canaanite language closest to the northwestern Semitic languages of Hebrew and Ugaritic (the latter was discovered in 1929 at an earlier dig in Ugarit, Syria). One specialist in Ugaritic and Hebrew, American Jesuit Mitchell Dahood of Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, goes further. He contends that Eblaite is more directly tied to Hebrew than to Ugaritic, although Ebla was closer to Ugarit in both geography and chronology. Against a considerable scholarly...
...search for a settlement from the 2nd millennium B.C. that would reveal the urban roots of Western European culture. He had dated the broken basin to that era and discovered, near the farmer's field, the imposing Tell Mardikh with telltale pottery shards strewn across its surface. The dig began in 1964. What was found raised more questions, but no sensational finds-till four years later. Then, on a scorching day, workers uncovered a 2nd millennium headless basalt statue of a man wearing a robe inscribed with the first cuneiform signs found on the site. In the 26 columns...
...This is the most exciting find of my career because it stimulates our research of the earliest stages of mammalian history." Jenkins said last night of the one-cm.-long jaw bone found during a six-week dig in northeastern Arizona sponsored by the National Geographic Society...
...longer. Shenzhen (the new spelling under the Pinyin system) is now a vast building site. Construction crews stir dust as they dig sewers, build roads and prepare foundations for factories and apartment buildings. Local women wearing skintight jeans made in Hong Kong sell U.S. and British cigarettes and cans of Coca-Cola from roadside stalls. Hackies hustle bewildered visitors, demanding as much as $65 an hour for riding in their dilapidated Japanese-made taxis...