the fact of similarities in story lines thruout world literature and legend
in NO WAY suggests plagiarism
Of course it does. That doesn't prove plagiarism, but it certainly suggests it. Especially in this case, considering the geographic proximity.
Moreso since they have the Ugarit tablets from Ras Shamra.
www.theology.edu
Excerpt:
In the Late Bronze Age (c. 1400 BC) when Ugarit flourished, Cyprus was the main exporter of copper, the base of Ugarit's economy. The Cypriote port of Famagusta faces Minet el-Beida and Ras Shamra some 100 miles away. Cypriot artifacts, abundant at Ras Shamra, indicated a close connection with Cyprus. Schaeffer instinctively turned his attention to the eastern tip of Cyprus to seek the connecting link with Ras Shamra. he found it at Enkomi, the site of the ancient Cypriote capital of Alasia. After preliminary reports, the series Alasia was launched in 1969 on the occasion of the 20th archeological expedition to that site.
For understanding the text of the Hebrew Bible and its Canaanite background, there is no more important source than the tablets of Ugarit.
The Importance of the Ugaritic Tablets for Biblical Studies
Decipherment of the Tablets
It was on May 14, 1929, as the dirt was being cleared from the floor of what had once been a building that the first clay tablets were found. The texts, together with their written substance, appeared to come from the 14th and 13th c. BC.
No doubt Schaeffer was thrilled to have discovered the ancient texts as well as artifacts. Yet the real significance of the texts did not become evident until the writing was examined in detail. Schaeffer himself was an archeologist, not a linguist; he entrusted the examination of the texts to Charles Virolleaud, the local director of the Burearu of Antiquities, who was skilled in the ancient languages and scripts of the area. As Virolleaud examined the tablets, he recognized immediately that he was faced with a significant discovery. The tablets contained cuneiform writing, which was known well enough from the multitude of texts recovered from other excavations. But the writing on these texts from Ras Shamra was entirely different from any of the other forms of cuneiform Virolleaud had ever seen. Instead of the several hundred different symbols typical of the normal syllabic cuneiform script, these newly discovered tablets contained fewere than 30 distinct symbols. It appeared, in other words, that the tablets contained writing in a kind of cuneiform alphabet.
After determining the apparently alphabetic character of the writing Virolleaud then faced the dauntng task of deciphering the script. He was able to make only a little progress in the first weeks, but as a service to scholars, he published the texts, providing photographs and copies of the inscriptions for examination by his colleagues. The most remarkable part in the story of the decipherment was played by Hans Bauer, who received a copy of Virolleaud's photographs and transcriptions on April 22, 1930.
Bauer brought an extraordinary background to his role as decipherer. Then 51, he was Professor of Oriental Languages in the German universty of Halle. He was multilingual, having mastered some East Asian languages in addition to the Semitic languages. But perhaps his most important skill had been honed during service in the German armed forces in World War I. He had been engaged in cryptanalysis, or code-breaking, for German intelligence. That experience had taught him the value of using a statistical method to crack codes. Five days after receiving copies of the texts, Bauer succeeded in assigning phonetic values to 20 of the cuneiform symbols, or about 80 percent of the signs used on the tablets. His work was refined and corrected in some details by others: Edourard Dhorme in Jerusalem and Virolleaud in Latakia put the finishing touches to Bauer's decipherment. From the summer of 1930, the clay tablets recovered from Ras Shamra by Schaeffer's team could be translated and read.
www.latimes.com
en.wikipedia.org
