"The story of the discovery of a lost 4,500 year old city and empire and its sensational impact on Biblical history"
From the book jacket:
The site: the lost kingdom of Ebla, missing for the past 4,500 years. Located in northwestern Syria, it has been excavated since 1964 by a team of Italian archaeologists.
The discovery: Ebla's royal archive, nearly 20,000 clay tablets written in two languages, one a hitherto unknown Semitic dialect. It has been rated with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone as an archaeological landmark.
The substance: a record fleshing out the skeletons of a long-lost civilization, a vast commercial and cultural empire of a quarter of a million people rivaling the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The clay rectangles outline diplomatic affairs; sophisticated trade agreements in textiles; laws; and administrative orders. Here are incised hymns, incantations, and school exercises. But even more important than the astonishing details of the workaday world of the Near East of forty-five centuries past are the highly controversial documentations of previously unsubstantiated accounts of some of the names and places mentioned in the Bible--including Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jerusalem.
As the Rev. Carlo Montini, Rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, has stated, Ebla is a "tremendously important discovery for understanding the Bible. It throws a whole new light on Biblical history in the area where the Bible was produced."
From the book jacket:
The site: the lost kingdom of Ebla, missing for the past 4,500 years. Located in northwestern Syria, it has been excavated since 1964 by a team of Italian archaeologists.
The discovery: Ebla's royal archive, nearly 20,000 clay tablets written in two languages, one a hitherto unknown Semitic dialect. It has been rated with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone as an archaeological landmark.
The substance: a record fleshing out the skeletons of a long-lost civilization, a vast commercial and cultural empire of a quarter of a million people rivaling the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The clay rectangles outline diplomatic affairs; sophisticated trade agreements in textiles; laws; and administrative orders. Here are incised hymns, incantations, and school exercises. But even more important than the astonishing details of the workaday world of the Near East of forty-five centuries past are the highly controversial documentations of previously unsubstantiated accounts of some of the names and places mentioned in the Bible--including Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jerusalem.
As the Rev. Carlo Montini, Rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, has stated, Ebla is a "tremendously important discovery for understanding the Bible. It throws a whole new light on Biblical history in the area where the Bible was produced."
