Elba Tablets

So much has been written about the contents of the Bible that it is excusable to think that it somehow operated in a vacuum.  In fact this was a world of city states built around a palace culture that provide the community a form of communal economy able to support metal buying and large scale trade.  That religion was codified in most such centers is obvious and that such was made somewhat unique to each city state was surely necessary.

 

The material on the Elba tablets arose in the two centuries preceding the appearance of the sea peoples along the Mediterranean littoral. Thus the material dovetails nicely into the biblical narrative.  That a common language dominated along the Levant is also reasonable.  That it changed throughout the region with the advent of the sea peoples is also likely.  Then again, without a system of common education, language drifts seriously within five hundred years.

 

In short the time frame fits the biblical sources admirably.  Elba is clear evidence of a common language and culture throughout the Levant.  Having only one source has raised the prestige of that particular source. It is much more reasonable that all the polities maintained their own records and histories and that the Bible is but an example of current custom.

 

Again Elba is a snapshot of the Levant before the advent of the culture of the sea peoples who would shortly own the coasts of these lands first as a foreign imperial power able to project force by sea and later as occupiers of coastal enclaves that largely integrated and intermarried with local clans after the empire itself disappeared in 1159 BCE.

 

The Mystery Of The Ebla Tablets

http://unexplainedmysteriesoftheworld.com/archives/the-mystery-of-the-ebla-tablets

http://unexplainedmysteriesoftheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Ebla-Tablets-200x300.jpg

Ancient Ebla was located in Northern Syria, approximately halfway between the modern cities of Hamath and Aleppo.  Excavations at that site began in the 1960s, and in the 1970s a series of extraordinary tablets was discovered among the ruins of an ancient palace.  These tablets became known as "The Ebla Tablets", and they were originally discovered under the direction of two professors from the University of Rome - Dr. Paolo Matthiae and Dr. Giovanni Petinato. At this point, about 17,000 tablets from the ancient Eblaite Kingdom have been recovered.  These tablets appear to have been written during the two last generations of ancient Ebla.  This means that they probably come from some time around 2300 to 2250 B.C.  But what is remarkable about the Ebla tablets is not how old they are, but rather the amazing parallels to the Bible that they contain.

For example, one scholar was very surprised at just how close much of the language on the tablets is to ancient Hebrew....

The vocabularies at Ebla were distinctively Semitic: the word "to write" is k-t-b (as in Hebrew), while that for "king" is "malikum," and that for "man" is "adamu." The closeness to Hebrew is surprising.

In addition, a vast array of Biblical names that have not been found in any other ancient Near Eastern languages have been reported to have been found in similar forms in Eblaite (one of the two languages found on the tablets).

For instance, the names of Adam, Eve, Abarama/Abraham, Bilhah, Ishmael, Esau, Mika-el, Saul and David have been found on the tablets.  Now, it is important to note that the tablets are not necessarily referring to those specific people.  Rather, what it does demonstrate is that those names were commonly used in ancient times.

In addition, quite a few ancient Biblical cities are also mentioned by name in the Ebla tablets.

For example, Ashtaroth, Sinai, Jerusalem, Hazor, Lachish, Megiddo, Gaza, Joppa, Ur, and Damascus are all reportedly referred to by name in the tablets.

Giovanni Pettinato says that he also found references to the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the tablets.  In fact, one key discovery appears to relate directly to Genesis chapter 14.  Some Bible skeptics have long tried to claim that the victory of Abraham over Chedorlaomer and the Mesopotamian kings in Genesis 14 was fictional and that the five "cities of the plain" (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar) referred to in that chapter are legendary.  But it turns out that the Ebla tablets refer to all five of the "cities of the plain", and on one tablet the cities are listed in the exact same order that we find in Genesis chapter 14.

Amazing.

But that is not all.

Even more extraordinary was the discovery of "a creation hymn" in the tablets.

In fact, three different versions of the Eblaite "creation hymn" were discovered. One of the creation hymns was translated by Pettinato as follows....

Lord of heaven and earth:

the earth was not, you created it,

the light of day was not, you created it,

the morning light you had not [yet] made exist.

This clearly parallels the Biblical account.  In the Bible we also find a "Lord of heaven and earth" who created the earth and everything around it out of nothing.

However, it is important to note that Ebla was primarily a pagan culture.  Pagan gods such as Dagan, Baal and Ishtar were very important to the people of that time.  But the truth is that these tablets do confirm quite a few historical details found in the Scriptures. 

There is probably much more to be discovered about the ancient Eblaite people, but in recent decades progress has been slowed by religious and political conflicts.  Perhaps we will never know for certain where the people of ancient Ebla came from, how much they actually knew of the true God of the Bible, or why their language had such similarities to Hebrew.

Climate Chart manipulation and Key Data

I set out yesterday to pull together whatever evidence could be marshaled for annual temperature ranges since the Bronze age. after a short review of the literature, I was disconcerted to recognize that our available information has been aggressively manipulated to play down the Medieval warm spell and more recently to enhance the apparent effect of the recent rise. This last rise has been challenged and debunked. Do not get me wrong. Temperatures have risen as is their natural inclination in the northern hemisphere, but not even to the level of previous optimums as yet. The hockey stick chart was pretending otherwise.

The point that I am making is that I cannot trust the data presented, because scholars have apparently taken political positions and are pushing the limits of the data as offensive as that is.

So how do we get past that difficulty. As I have posted earlier, It is clear to me that the natural tendency of the northern hemisphere is to annually gain a little heat, while the opposite is true for the southern hemisphere. Certainly land distribution alone sets up this unique capacity. This means that the northern hemisphere will sustain a long slow warming trend that goes on for hundreds of years while the south simply gets a little colder. The north will eventually achieve an optimum that will appear quite stable.

More importantly, since the north is generally warming, any measured chart will tend to be volatile upward and very difficult pin down. That means that for any small section, the upward volatility will be the same. The same will not be true for periods in which there has been an injection of cold. The floor will drop dramatically and hold for a long time until warming effects take charge. I am of course positing that an injection of cold water takes place into the Atlantic basin over a fairly short period of time, turning over the heat imbalance that has built up.

What this means is that we need to carefully study the historical record for the onset of North European cold spells. That will typically reset the warming clock.

We had a cold spell kick off in the late fifteenth century, and also the late fifth century and somewhere back in the post 1000 BCE world. The two earliest had the effect of depopulating northern Europe and gave us the Sea peoples(also likely known as the Greeks) and in the fifth century wiped out the Western Roman Empire. This last time around, we merely suffered and overcame. Of course, we enthusiastically invaded the Americas and I suspect that the Indians never noticed the difference..

The point that I am making is that these cold spells are abrupt and very effective. The recovery seems to take around a thousand years. It also appears that the last half is quite balmy, as demonstrated by the conditions attested in the historical record.

Perhaps it is not an accident that the Romans were able to grab Western Europe for 500 years with the state of their agricultural technology.

There is every reason to think that the only important data point(s) on the temperature chart is the onset point of very cold weather, representing the injection of a mass of cold water. The only thing that we do not know is the actual scope of the event. It may last only one season and inject enough cold water to do the job. That would be my preference and supports the abrupt apparent temperature shift.

An alternative is an expansion of the flow rate of the respective currents that is sustained for years. The difficulty with that scenario is that we would have a slow climatic decline rather than the abrupt conversions that seem to have occurred. Of course we will never know for sure until it happens again in perhaps 400 years.

What I am saying is that instead of studying the warm years of the chart, we need to focus on perfecting our knowledge of when it became nasty cold. Remember, that the barbarians who invaded Gaul gathered at the Rhine and waited it for the river to freeze!

The rest of the data can be impacted by everything from Volcanoes to forest fires and who really notices if spring is a week early or not when the effect can be very local. Knowing that a sustained cold spell is not a normal event is very helpful in understanding our options and our temperature charts.