Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other hand, the theological significance of Ebla may be nil. Although the city was once a great commercial center, trading with Canaan and regions beyond, Matthiae insists that tablets from the 3rd millennium B.C. are far too old to have any important links with the much later texts of the Old Testament. Moreover, Ebla's language is problematic. "Eblaite" is a Semitic tongue written in cuneiform characters borrowed from Mesopotamia...
...that the Elaites might have been the ancestors of today's Israelis fell into Middle East politics like a missile. Israeli archaeologists shuddered. The Syrians detected Zionist designs in the notion and persuaded Matthiae and Pettinato to warn other scholars publicly against making ethnic linkages between the 3rd millennium B.C. and the 20th century...
...down more than 1,000 years later than the events they purport to describe. Now, in the area of the world that produced the Bible, Ebla has established that sophisticated and extensive written culture existed well before Moses and even Abraham, as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium B.C. According to the ebullient Dahood, "After Ebla, we've got to take the Bible much more seriously as a historical document. The people who wrote those books had a long literary tradition behind them...
Seven years later the Syrian government requested an archaeological team in a cultural exchange with Italy. In charge was Archaeologist Paolo Matthiae, 22. The intense young archaeologist decided to 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...
...ending with a city in political and cultural decline, destroyed in 1600 B.C. by the invading Hittites. In 1973 the team found a royal palace from the 3rd millennium and, a year later, a small room with 42 tablets, resembling petrified waffles flung across the floor. The cuneiform on some tablets was Sumerian; on others it was indecipherable. Almost 1,000 more tablets were unearthed in September...