The Amarna Letters

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The excavation site at Amarna, Egypt. 

The two letters from the king of Alashiya to the Pharaoh of Egypt were discovered in 1887 amid the ruins of Akhenaten, the capital of Egypt under the then Pharaoh Akhenaten, now known el Amarna. They were discovered quite by accident: a peasant woman, digging among the ruins of the city, first happened upon them, and subsequent excavations revealed approximately 380 letters.[1] The fact that the tablets were made of the non-Egyptian medium of clay and in the non-Egyptian cuneiform script led to scholars at the time dismissing them as fakes. It was only when the curator of the British Museum Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, an Egyptologist familiar with cuneiform script, was shown the collection did he verify their authenticity as both “genuine and of very great historical importance.”[2] Unfortunately, by this point in time, many of the tablets had been damaged or even destroyed due to careless handling.

Content aside, the physical letters themselves are interesting. Recent material analysis has revealed that the majority of these tablets were not originals, but were actually copies prepared for internal circulation. They demonstrate high-level of sophistication within the Egyptian state. These letters would have been translated from cuneiform, the official diplomatic language at the time, into Egyptian hieroglyphics by Egyptian clerks. These translations would then be used to inform future correspondence on behalf of the Pharaoh.[3] That these letters were discovered collected together represents an effort by the Egyptians, similarly to its contemporary rivals to archive their diplomatic correspondence and international treaties, in a similar vein to modern day governance.[4] As Reeves points out, “it is obvious that the el-Amarna find represented no more than the discarded tip of a veritable iceberg of documentation which must one have exited and may still, in time, be turned up at the same site or elsewhere.”[5] And indeed, Van De Mieroop points out that the Egyptian archive was by no means unique, with similar diplomatic letters being found in Syro-Palestinian cities from the kings of Katti, Assyria, and Babylonia.[6] What the letters tell us about the power dynamic in this age of written diplomacy is where their true values lies, however.

 



[1] Reeves, Akhenaten, 62-3

[2] Ibid., 64.

[3] Ibid., 63.

[4] Marc Van de Mieroop, The Club of the Great Powers’. In A History of the Ancient Near East, Ca. 3000-323 BC, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004), 122.

[5] Reeves, Akhenaten, 63.

[6] Van de Mieroop, The Club of the Great Powers’, 127.