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
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A Fragment of an Old Syrian Sculpture from Ebla
Fs Marcella Frangipane, 2020
The fragment presented here most probably belongs to the top of a stele and was found in Area G of Ebla during the Winter 1967-68. The preserved part shows two different banquet scenes, which are here considered, in the attempt to understand their nature and to improve our knowledge of the complex representation of power in Old Syrian Ebla. The fragment adds up with two nearly completely reconstructed monuments-Ishtar's Stele and Obelisk-and is a further evidence of the high level of elaboration in the elite languages of pre-classical Syria, in particular of Ebla.
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