The Ark

1000 years before Abraham, a civilization in Northern Syria flourished, with the first known Semitic language.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Today its remains include palaces, temples, city walls, and thousands of cuneiform tablets which are being deciphered by Professor Gary Rendsburg.

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Rachael Kohn: Long before Ancient Greece reached the heights of civilisation and more than a thousand years before Abraham, a wealthy metropolis flourished at Ebla in the North of Syria.

Hello, this is The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

In fact Ebla's temples, city walls and palaces were hidden until the late 1960s. But today, archaeologists have their work cut out of them, trying to decipher thousands of inscription of the first known Semitic language.

Visiting Australia from Rutgers University in New Jersey, Gary Rendsburg is one of the world's experts on Ebla.

Gary Rendsburg: Ebla is a major archaeological site in Syria, in the northern part of the country, about 70 kilometres south of Aleppo, which is the largest modern city nearby.

Rachael Kohn: Well that would make it between two of the most important ancient regions, that is Egypt to the West, Mesopotamia to the East.

Gary Rendsburg: Correct.

Rachael Kohn: What did scholars think actually existed between these two great civilisations?

Gary Rendsburg: Well we all know that Egypt was one of the great civilisations early on, and this is also true of Mesopotamia. And in between, which is modern-day countries of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, was basically assumed to be open terrain, mainly people in tribal societies shepherding flocks, sheep, goats, maybe some cattle, devoid of major cosmopolitan cities. And that was the big surprise when Ebla was discovered.

Rachael Kohn: And is this actually the region known in the Bible as Canaan?

Gary Rendsburg: Well the word 'Canaan' is an amorphous term. The Bible in all ancient texts don't give us national boundaries like we have today. I would say it's the far northern reaches of Canaan if you wanted to speak of a greater Canaan. Most scholars would prefer to just refer to it as Syria, which again is not an ancient term, but nevertheless that's the way we refer to it.

Rachael Kohn: Well when did archaeologists get their first indication that something important was there?

Gary Rendsburg: Well in hindsight we should have known just by the mere size of this mound. It's a massive archaeological Tell, but until you start digging, you just don't know.

Rachael Kohn: Now 'Tell' means hill.

Gary Rendsburg: Tell is a word for a hill, but specifically an artifically formed hill, not a natural hill, but an artifically formed hill, one that's been built up over millennia of a particular city being built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and so the layers of the civilisation just pile up on top of each other and create this artificial hill.

Rachael Kohn: And is a Tell then very easy to distinguish from a natural hill?

Gary Rendsburg: The geologists say they can tell the difference (no pun intended) just by looking at it, and most people can as well. The slopes tend to be much more artificial than the natural hill, which would be a little bumpy here or there, and so on and so forth. So usually we can tell just by looking at a distance, if you saw it at a distance you could say Well there's an archaeological site, let's go dig there.

Rachael Kohn: Well what were the first discoveries and when were they made?

Gary Rendsburg: Archaeologists started digging, by the way the archaeologists were a team of Italian archaeologists, excavators, and they've been working there now on and off for about 40 years.

They started digging in 1964, and just said, Let's find out what's in this massive site. And they found the usual things that archaeologists find: lots of pottery and architecture, city walls and things like that. The world of archaeology is such that until you find an inscription, basically you're just looking through what we call material culture, and doing the best you can to interpret what you find. But one inscription will very often tell you more history than you would ever find from looking at several thousand pieces of pottery, artwork, glass and metal, sculpture, all sorts of things.

And the discovery came some time in the 1970s when they discovered a fragment of a torso, it must have been a statue of the king whose name is mentioned there, and he refers to himself as the King of Ebla. The city of Ebla was known from Mesopotamian sources in Sumerian and in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Mesopotamia. We just didn't know where Ebla was, and this was the first clue that this was the site of Ebla. And they kept digging and digging and digging, and finally in 1974 found some cuneiform tablets.

Rachael Kohn: Cuneiform?

Gary Rendsburg: Cuneiform is a script which was used to record a variety of languages.

I already mentioned Samarian and Akadian and eventually it was used for writing of Hittite and Hurrian and a variety of languages in the area, and now we know also Eblaic was written in the same script.

It's a bit like the Latin alphabet, which was created specifically for ancient Latin but eventually spread to not only dozens, but by now hundreds of languages in the world, including our own, which use that script. And the same thing's true of cuneiform. It's a cumbersome script, it's nothing like the ease of our Latin alphabet with 26 letters, it's got hundreds of different signs and symbols. It's written by incising into wet clay with a reed instrument and creating little scratches and so on that the scribes could then read.

Rachael Kohn: And how far back are the earliest remains that were found?

Gary Rendsburg: The earliest cuneiform documents go back to 3000 BCE if not a little bit before that, so it's about 5,000 years ago. And the Eblaic material is about 2400 BCE.

Rachael Kohn: So that would put it into Akkadian times?

Gary Rendsburg: Eblaic is actually we now know, attested about a century or two before our earliest Akadian material and therefore gains the moniker of the earliest attested Semitic language.

Rachael Kohn: Were these tablets able to be read when they were discovered?

Gary Rendsburg: The scholars who read them were typically scholars of Sumerian and Akkadian, and yes, they could read them, but they realised that it was neither of those languages. Sumerian is first of all not a Semitic language. They realised this was a Semitic language, the vocabulary looked like any Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian and so on, but with slightly different forms, and so on, and then they began to realise that this was a new, distinct Semitic language.

Rachael Kohn: And have they been able to crack the code? Do they know what those tablets were largely about?

Gary Rendsburg: As with most archaeological discoveries, including those which are written materials, the vast majority of material you find are administrative texts. If you just started looking at the things that you have in writing in your own house.

Rachael Kohn: You mean receipts?

Gary Rendsburg: Receipts, legal documents, a copy of your will, your mortgage, your bank records, your laundry lists, your shopping lists which was left behind because you, as we all know, forget to take it to the store when we go. All those things would be found. And the small minority of material would be what we would call literature, fiction or non-fiction material which in the ancient world would mean stories, history, epics and so on.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed, well is there anything like the epic of Gilgamesh, the most famous epic prior to the Bible, I suppose?

Gary Rendsburg: Unfortunately no. We wish there were. There is nothing of great literature per se at Ebla.

We're really looking mainly at these kind of administrative texts which record the economy of the city, and we can reconstruct the economy which was especially based on wool, as you can imagine, this is the area in which sheep and goats are all over the place, sheep in particular.

They had huge inventories of wool, so these texts record on a daily or monthly basis, the quantities of wool that were brought in from the fields surrounding, and then the wool was processed into different types of garments and sent to the cities in the region. That's what these texts basically are describing for us.

Rachael Kohn: What else does the material culture tell us about the people, how they lived?

Gary Rendsburg: Well the surprise was based on the size of this city and the size of the palace and the size of the temples, we have several temples to different gods and a very, very large palace, that this is not a society that was structured in a tribal system, but rather a major city-state with a king, and a developed priesthood, several developed priesthoods serving in the various temples.

We have very large city gates with a large city wall, so we're dealing here with something that would have in antiquity rivalled, these are cities that are known from slightly later, the city of Babylon, or the city of Ur, or a major city in Egypt, this was a very, very large city. A real surprise to those of us who thought that we'd be finding a cultural backwater in the middle of northern Syria.

Rachael Kohn: Well is there anything about their life which we find described in the Bible much later for example? Is there any connection with what's found there and descriptions in the Bible?

Gary Rendsburg: No direct connections. As you just said, the Bible's attested from a much later period, so we're talking about a time which is 1,000 years or so before Abraham, depending when one dates Abraham, certainly about 1200 years before Moses, and of course later Biblical figures like David and Solomon would be even later down the chronological record. So nothing of direct consequence.

What we do get at Ebla, and this is where my own particular work is involved, is something very exciting, and that is, as I mentioned, the earliest attested Semitic language always gives us new information about grammatical forms and words, and tracing the history of words and so on. There are several words in the Bible, Hebrew words, whose exact meaning was not known until the discovery of the Ebla texts, because a rare word in the Bible might be used more commonly in some other Semitic language and indeed it turns out to be the case.

Rachael Kohn: And what is such an example?

Gary Rendsburg: Well my favourite example is the following. There is a particular bird that's mentioned in the Bible, and it's not even clear because of a scribal problem in those two passages, one in the book of Isaiah, one in the book of Jeremiah, if it's one bird or two birds that is being described there. And the first word is seus and the second one is agor [phonetic pron.], and we now know from the description of this bird, in a variety of texts, including Ebla, we're able to piece together a variety of clues, and my own hypothesis is that it's the Golden Oriole, which is one of the popular birds of that region, because we can figure out from the passages that it's colourful, that it's migratory, it's small, and it's a song bird as well. There are very few birds in the area that fit the description of those four qualities.

Just a little piece of a puzzle, it's not a major issue that's going to upset the applecart and tell us that Isaiah was saying this instead of that, or Jeremiah was saying this instead of that. We knew it was a bird from those passages, but it's just the love of doing puzzles that leads our scholarship forward.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed. Well I thought you were going to say that your big discovery was that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. But -

Gary Rendsburg: That's a beautiful little ditty, especially if you're from Australia.

Rachael Kohn: Well probably one of the most important kind of document to be found in antiquity, apart from the great epic, is the legal code, and one thinks of Hammurabi's Code, and the code of law in the Torah. Is there anything like that to be found at Ebla?

Gary Rendsburg: Again, no great legal texts. There's no collections of laws.

We can piece together certain legal practices perhaps based on these texts, but I should mention that these texts are not easy to read, and so we're just beginning to piece some of those things together, and trying to figure out what a particular word might mean in such a context.

Also to keep in mind that legal language in particular is usually very archaic and not very clear to us, even think about native English speakers who require a well-trained lawyer to go through the legal material with them, and that's also true of ancient languages. You need an expert who's going to be able to tell you what this term means in this particular passage, and try to put all that together, is another chase that we're after.

Rachael Kohn: Goodness, that's a very specialised skill isn't it?

Gary Rendsburg: Right. Sure is.

Rachael Kohn: Well, what happened to the people of Ebla?

Gary Rendsburg: All cities, no matter how powerful, come to an end at some point. In this particular case, we're pretty sure what happened, because a later king of Akkad, which is the great centre in Mesopotamia where the term Akkadian comes from, a king by the name of Naram Sin, claims to have been the ruler, or the conqueror of Ebla, and we've known that for a while, I mentioned that Ebla's attested in other texts over in Mesopotamia, but we do know that Ebla was destroyed at some time, and it looks like it could be dated to the time of Naram Sin, and so presumably a war between the city of Ebla and the region of Akkad several hundred miles to the east occurred, and Naram Sin conquered Ebla and probably burnt it to the ground, and began to rule over that territory.

We do know the city was later rebuilt and we do know that the city had another time when it flourished about 1800 BCE and after that we know very little about the city's history, it appears to have died out as a major centre and like I mentioned before, was sitting there under the surface of this tell awaiting the spate of Italian archaeologists in the 1960s.

Rachael Kohn: Can I ask you something finally about Eblite religions; many people look to the past to find goddesses. Is there any evidence of that sort of thing among the Eblites?

Gary Rendsburg: Most of the main gods that we see there are male, and do equate with deities that we know from elsewhere, a god named Dagan; readers of the Bible may recognise the name of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, so he's mentioned there at Ebla.

But as far as we can see, goddesses are mentioned, but they seem to play only a secondary role as the consort to the main gods, or they're mentioned in lists where their sacrifices were performed to such-and-such a goddess. But the centrality of a goddess such as we have from Mesopotamia with Ishtar for example, is not yet found in Ebla, but as I said, we're talking about a lot of work still to be done, going through the thousands of tablets that have been found.

Rachael Kohn: Gary Rendsburg is Scholar-in-Residence at Mandelbaum House, at the University of Sydney, and is the author of five books, including The Bible and the Ancient Near East. More details are on The Ark website.

Tune in next week for another adventure into religious history on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

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Guests

Gary Rendsburg
is the Blanche & Irving Laurie Professor of Jewish History at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. His areas of special interest include literary approaches to the Bible, the history of ancient Israel, and the literature and culture of ancient Egypt. He is the author of five books.

Publications

Title: The Bible and the Ancient Near East
Author : Gary Rendsburg
Publisher: W.W.Norton, 1998