After Ta'yinat: the new status of Esarhaddon's adê for Assyrian political history, RA 106 (2012), 133-158 (original) (raw)

In the course of a long and hugely successful archaeological career, Paolo Matthiae has linked his name to discoveries which revolutionized previous scholarly knowledge and / or longstanding beliefs on ancient Syria. Obviously, the earliest of such achievements concerned the art-historical sphere: thus, the Ebla reliefs and inlays came to fully confirm the seminal perspective that he had suggested in his 1962 Dissertation on Ars Syra. However, they also touched upon the textual domain, due to his retrieval of the Ebla archives but also to the subsequent promotion of an internationally-based program for their publication. At present, after some 30 years of research, the copious linguistic and philological data from Ebla have transformed the classificatory grids of most ancient Semitics and Assyriology, while at the same time populating the previously sparse historical landscape of 3 rd -millennium Syria with new protagonists and institutional realities. For this remarkable capacity of his in fostering "paradigm shifts", I thus hope that Paolo will enjoy the following essay in his honor, meant to illustrate how a recent archaeological discovery has crucially altered the outlook on a famous Neo-Assyrian text. 1