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May 15, 2005
A Couple of Thousand Years Just May Make a Difference
IOL, a South Africa online news service, published a report of the discovery of a statue of a winged Goddess of Triumph from Palmyra. What interested me about this is that the story offered the following information:
SANA quoted the head of the Palmyra Antiquities Department as saying the statue was "very important", noting that it may go back to the second or third millennium. [emphasis added]
SANA is the Syrian Arab News Agency. What interested me was the reference to the second millennium. I wasn't sure which second millennium goddess or statue morphology was implied. So I started to look into it. There is a connection between a Roman "Goddess of Triumph" and Pallas Athena which via Homer would get us back to the second millennium. And of course Tadmor (the older name of Palmyra) is mentioned in the second millennium Mari texts. The apparent mention in 2 Chronicles 8:4 is likely an error (see 1 Kings 9:18). It may also be known from Ugarit in the late second millennium (UT 2076:28, UT 169 rev. 3 and UT 1026 rev.3)1. But somehow, the connection between the statue and the second or third millennium didn't seem right. So I decided to go to the original SANA hoping I could avoid looking up every word in an Arabic-English dictionary and still not having the foggiest idea what it said. Lo and behold, there were three languages from which to choose. So I selected English. And here is what I found on this subject.
He [the head of the Palmyra Antiquities Department] added that the statue will be compared with other statues that date back to the second and third centuries A.D.. [emphasis added]
Oops. In other words, contemporary statues. Second or third millennium verses the second and third centuries A.D. So I checked out the French: "au 2ème et 3ème siècle." I think that means "second and third century." That was enough for me. I still didn't go all the way to the Arabic source. But I am sure that this statue has little to do with the second or third millennium.
Notes:
1 Astour, Michael C and Duane E. Smith, "Place Names" Ras Shamra Parallels vol II, Loren R. Fisher ed., Analecta Orientalia 50, Pontificium Institutum Biblicum: Rome, 1975, p. 335
Posted by Duane Smith at May 15, 2005 8:00 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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