Giovanni Garbini was an Italian Orientalist and Semitist.
23 Facts About Giovanni Garbini
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Giovanni Garbini worked as a university lecturer in the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, at the Scuola Normale in Pisa and finally in Sapienza in Rome until his retirement.
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Giovanni Garbini was a member of the Lincean Academy since 1990, and a member of the Leone Caetani foundation for Islamic studies.
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Giovanni Garbini's family settled in Rome when he was young.
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Giovanni Garbini studied classical literature, following which he was uncertain about his career path.
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Giovanni Garbini was an avid student and was fondly remembered by his teachers Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Alfonsa Ferrari, Margherita Guarducci, and Massimo Pallottino.
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Giovanni Garbini capped his Oriental studies with Assyriology under Giuseppe Furlani and Arabic with Maria Nallino.
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Giovanni Garbini was conscripted and left for Lecce on 19 January 1955; he resumed his academic work with Moscati, who encouraged him to continue work on his thesis.
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Giovanni Garbini collaborated during his early years on the Encyclopedia of Classical Art under the guidance of once teacher Bandinelli.
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In 1960, Giovanni Garbini obtained the chair of Semitic philology at the Oriental Institute of Naples, and he continued to hold courses at Rome's Sapienza and to participate in excavation campaigns organized by Moscati.
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In November 1982, Giovanni Garbini returned to the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies as a successor to Sabatino Moscati, who had moved to the new University of Rome Tor Vergata.
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On 30 July 1983 Giovanni Garbini was admitted as a corresponding member at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei; he became a national member on 6 December 1990.
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Giovanni Garbini was an expert in ancient Near-Eastern Semitic languages, history, religion, and biblical philology; he produced a total thirty monographs, close to five hundred articles, and numerous encyclopedia entries and reviews related to Semitic studies and his other fields of expertise.
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Giovanni Garbini reconsidered this hypothesis following a broad research into other Semitic languages.
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Giovanni Garbini added that the Amorite language's innovative process left a long-lasting influence on the extinct languages of northern Syria and Phoenicia as well as Aramaic and Arabic.
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Giovanni Garbini produced two other monographs dedicated to the Semitic linguistics: in his 1979 History and Problems of Semitic Epigraphy, and in his 2006 Introduction to Semitic Epigraphy.
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Giovanni Garbini thereafter explains that the story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt are older than, and independent from, those of Abraham and the Patriarchs; he advanced that a united Davidic-Solomonic monarchy would have been only a literary construction since the Aramaic tribes that settled in Palestine would not have constituted the Kingdom of Israel until the birth of the Omrid dynasty around 900BC.
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Previous interpretations maintained that the Benjamite Saul established a local kingdom in central Palestine that was gradually reabsorbed by the Philistines; however, this was contested by Giovanni Garbini, who wrote that David could have only been a ninth-century captain of fortune fighters in the service of the Philistines and that Solomon was an absolutely mythical character.
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Giovanni Garbini puts forth that the Israelite king Amaziah established the Kingdom of Judah in Jerusalem that gained the upper hand when international events led to the end of the northern kingdom of Samaria.
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Giovanni Garbini ascertained the existence, in Jerusalem between the reign of Hezekiah and that of Josiah, of a long Ammonite reign over Judah that was erased by Hebrew scribes.
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Giovanni Garbini highlighted the importance of the Philistine people in the later Bronze Age throughout the Mediterranean; the biblical scholar identifies them with the people of the "Peleset", mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions of Medinet Habu among the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt during the reign of Ramesses III.
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Giovanni Garbini maintains that the Philistines were the true rulers of Palestine between the eleventh and the middle of the ninth century BC.
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Not underestimating the iconographic similarities of the Peleset warriors from Egyptian sources with some warriors reproduced in the Sardinian bronzes, Giovanni Garbini affirmed that, in his opinion, "for about two centuries the Mediterranean was probably largely dominated by the Philistines".