The Amarna letters are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting ofdiplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom, between c. 1360–1332 BC. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are mostly written in a script known as Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, rather than that of ancient Egypt, and the language used has sometimes been characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian. The written correspondence spans a period of at most thirty years. The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, which came out in two volumes and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available. The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics, since they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in pre-biblical times. The letters, though written in Akkadian, are heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who spoke an early form of Canaanite, the language family which would later evolve into its daughter languages, Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.
The letters
These letters, comprising cuneiform tablets written primarily in Akkadian – the regional language of diplomacy for this period – were first discovered around 1887 by local Egyptians who secretly dug most of them from the ruined city of Amarna, and sold them in the antiquities market. They had originally been stored in an ancient building that archaeologists have since called the Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh. Once the location where they were found was determined, the ruins were explored for more. The first archaeologist who successfully recovered more tablets was Flinders Petrie, who in 1891 and 1892 uncovered 21 fragments. Émile Chassinat, then director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, acquired two more tablets in 1903. Since Knudtzon's edition, some 24 more tablets, or fragments, have been found, either in Egypt, or identified in the collections of various museums. The initial group of letters recovered by local Egyptians have been scattered among museums in Germany, England, Egypt, France, Russia, and the United States. Either 202 or 203 tablets are at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin; 99 are at the British Museum in London; 49 or 50 are at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; 7 at the Louvre in Paris; 3 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow; and 1 in the collection of the Oriental Institute in Chicago. The archive contains a wealth of information about cultures, kingdoms, events and individuals in a period from which few written sources survive. It includes correspondence from Akhenaten's reign, as well as his predecessor Amenhotep III's reign. The tablets consist of over 300 diplomatic letters; the remainder comprise miscellaneous literary and educational materials. These tablets shed much light on Egyptian relations with Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Canaan, and Alashiya as well as relations with the Mitanni, and the Hittites. The letters have been important in establishing both the history and the chronology of the period. Letters from the Babylonian king, Kadashman-Enlil I, anchor the timeframe of Akhenaten's reign to the mid-14th century BC. They also contain the first mention of a Near Eastern group known as the Habiru, whose possible connection with the Hebrews—due to the similarity of the words and their geographic location—remains debated. Other rulers involved in the letters include Tushratta of Mitanni, Lib'ayu of Shechem, Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, and the quarrelsome king, Rib-Hadda, of Byblos, who, in over 58 letters, continuously pleads for Egyptian military help. Specifically, the letters include requests for military help in the north against Hittite invaders, and in the south to fight against the Habiru.
Letter summary
Amarna Letters are politically arranged in rough counterclockwise fashion:
001–014 Babylonia
015–016 Assyria
017–030 Mitanni
031–032 Arzawa
033–040 Alashiya
041–044 Hatti
045–380+ Syria/Lebanon/Canaan
Amarna Letters from Syria/Lebanon/Canaan are distributed roughly:
045–067 Syria
068–227 Lebanon
227–380 Canaan.
Amarna letters list
Note: Many assignments are tentative; spellings vary widely. This is just a guide.
Chronology
summarizes the state of the chronology of these tablets as follows: From the internal evidence, the earliest possible date for this correspondence is the final decade of the reign of Amenhotep III, who ruled from 1388 to 1351 BC, possibly as early as this king's 30th regnal year; the latest date any of these letters were written is the desertion of the city of Amarna, commonly believed to have happened in the second year of the reign of Tutankhamun later in the same century in 1332 BC. Moran notes that some scholars believe one tablet, EA 16, may have been addressed to Tutankhamun's successor Ay. However, this speculation appears improbable because the Amarna archives were closed by Year 2 of Tutankhamun, when this king transferred Egypt's capital from Amarna to Thebes.
Quotations and phrases
A small number of the Amarna letters are in the class of poetry. An example is EA 153,. EA 153, entitled: "Ships on hold", from Abimilku of Tyre is a short, 20-line letter. Lines 6-8, and 9-11 are parallel phrases, each ending with "...before the troops of the king, my lord."-. Both sentences are identical, and repetitive, with only the subject statement changing. The entire corpus of Amarna letters has many standard phrases. It also has some phrases, and quotations used only once. Some are parables:
