Dating back to around 2500 BC, the Ebla tablets provide very important information regarding the history of religions. The most important feature of the Ebla tablets, discovered by archaeologists in 1975 and which have been the subject of much research and debate ever since, is that they contain the names of three prophets referred to in holy scriptures.
The discovery after thousands of years of the Ebla tablets and the information they contain is extremely important from the point of view of clarifying the geographical location of societies revealed in the Qur'an.
Around 2500 BC, Ebla was a kingdom covering an area that included the Syrian capital Damascus and south-east Turkey. This kingdom reached a cultural and economic peak but later, as happened to a great many civilizations, it disappeared from the stage of history. It was apparent from the records that were kept that the Kingdom of Ebla was a major cultural and commercial center of the time. (1) The people of Ebla possessed a civilization that established state archives, built libraries and recorded commercial contracts in written form. They even had their own language, known as Eblaite.
The History of Buried Religions
The true importance of the Kingdom of Ebla, regarded as a great success for classical archaeology when first discovered in 1975, came to light with the finding of some 20,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments. This archive was four times greater than all the cuneiform texts known to archaeologists over the last 3,000 years.
When the language used in the tablets was deciphered by the Italian Giovanni Pettinato, an epigrapher from the University of Rome, the scale of their importance was better understood. As a result of this, the finding of the Kingdom of Ebla and this magnificent state archive became a matter not just of archaeological interest, but one of interest to religious circles, too. That was because as well as the names Michael (Mi-ka-il) and Talut (Sa-u-lum), who struggled alongside the Prophet David, they also contained the names of prophets mentioned in the three holy books: The Prophet Abraham (Ab-ra-mu), the Prophet David (Da-u-dum) and the Prophet Ishamel (Ish-ma-il). (2)
The Importance of the Names on the Ebla TabletsThe names of the prophets identified in the Ebla tablets are of the greatest importance as this was the first time that they had been encountered in historical documents of such age. This information, dating back to 1500 years before the Torah, was most striking. The appearance in the tablets of the name of the Prophet Abraham recorded that the Prophet Abraham and the religion brought by him had existed before the Torah.
Historians analyzed the Ebla tablets from this perspective, and this major discovery regarding the Prophet Abraham and his mission became the subject of research with regard to the history of religions. David Noel Freedman, an American archaeologist and researcher into the history of religions, reported, based on his studies, the names of such prophets as Abraham and Ishmael in the tablets. (3)
Full story: http://www.everymuslim.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=191&Itemid=44
0 comments:
Post a Comment