Word: pettinato
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pettinato theorizes that the Eblaites evolved from polytheism into henotheism, the worship of a supreme creator-god within the pantheon. Ebla's pre-eminent deity was Dagan, a name which reappears as the Philistine god in the biblical account of Samson. Pettinato writes that in some Eblaite personal names, the syllables ya and el mean "god," and that Ya might have been the proper name of a specific deity. Naturally that brings to mind the later Hebrew names for the one God, Yahweh (Jehovah) and El (Lord). Pettinato also finds in Ebla a possible Flood story, prophets and tribal...
...such theoretical links depend upon transliterations and translations from the tablets themselves, and here the disputes give ample reason for caution. In the hybrid Eblaite language, a single sign can have a dozen meanings. Indeed, Alfonso Archi of the University of Rome, now the Ebla epigrapher, accuses both Pettinato and Dahood of distorting Eblaite religion by mistranslations. Harvard's Frank Cross, an authority on the Old Testament, believes that solid application of the Ebla findings remains a generation or two away. The majority of scholars concur...
Because of the difficulties, Father Dahood insists that all ancient Near Eastern languages must be studied in order to understand any one of them. He contends that "Ebla is clarified on point after point by the Bible," and vice versa. In a 48-page addendum to the Pettinato book he offers extensive technical examples from specific Bible texts. Dahood reckons that nearly a third of the poetic passages in the Old Testament still "evade precise translation and gram matical analysis." The major reason: 1,700 of the 8,000 Hebrew words in the Bible occur only once. Dahood reported last...
Professor of Assyriology Giovanni Pettinato was mystified by the writings. Cuneiform is, after all, not a language, only a style of writing. While the epigraphist could recognize the characters, some of them formed words of a language he had never encountered. Pettinato pondered photographs of the tablets for three months, then cracked the code. Sumerian characters had been used to write an early Western Semitic tongue he dubbed "Eblaite." On other tablets, straight Sumerian was written, functioning as an official language, as Latin did in medieval Europe...
...listed 70 names of animals; another, 260 ancient cities not yet known to historians. Still another was a breakdown of booty taken in a conquest of neighboring Mari, 240 miles away: the victorious commander got 15%, the rest went to the king of Ebla. Along with some literary documents, Pettinato also discovered a spectacular bonus: bilingual dictionaries, the oldest ever found, matching Eblaite words to Sumerian equivalents -and confirming his readings of the new language...