Five Amarna letters on display at the British Museum, London

EA 161, letter by Aziru, leader of Amurru (stating his case to pharaoh), one of the Amarna letters in cuneiform writing on a clay tablet.

The Amarna letters (/əˈmɑːrnə/; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA, for "El Amarna") are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom, spanning a period of no more than thirty years between c. 1360–1332 BC (see here for dates).^[1] The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s–1330s BC) during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt.

The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in the language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian;^[2] one especially long letter—abbreviated EA 24—was written in a late dialect of Hurrian, and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language.

The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, which came out in two volumes (1907 and 1915) and remains the standard edition to this day.^[2][3] The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available.^[2]

The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period. Though most are written in Akkadian, the Akkadian of the letters is heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who probably spoke an early form of Proto-Canaanite, the language(s) which would later evolve into the daughter languages of Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.^[4][5]

The letters

Amarna letter EA 153 from Abimilku.

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.^[6]

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;^[7] 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.^[8] A few tablets are at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels.^[9]

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 (Akhenaten who was also titled Amenhotep IV), 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 (Cyprus) 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.^[10]

Letter summary

Map of the ancient Near East during the Amarna period, showing the great powers of the period: Egypt (green), Mycenaean Greece (orange), Hatti (yellow), the Kassite kingdom of Babylon (purple), Assyria (grey), and Mitanni (red). Lighter areas show direct control, darker areas represent spheres of influence.

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 (where 68–140 are from Gubla aka Byblos)
• 227–380 Canaan (written mostly in the Canaano-Akkadian language).

Amarna letters list

Note: Many assignments are tentative; spellings vary widely. This is just a guide.^[3]

Quotations and phrases

A small number of the Amarna letters are in the class of poetry. An example is EA 153, (EA is for 'el Amarna'). 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."-('before', then line 8, line 11). 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: (EA 252: "...when an ant is pinched (struck), does it not fight back and bite the hand of the man that struck it?"....)

Example, single letter photo gallery, multiple sides

Amarna letter EA 15, from Ashur-uballit I; see also Amarna letter EA 153.

• 
  Obverse
• 
  line drawing, Obverse
• 
  Reverse
• 
  View from bottom

See also

• Abdi-Heba
• Amarna letters–localities and their rulers
• Ashur-uballit I
• Amarna Period
• Hittite inscriptions
• Labaya
• List of Amarna letters by size
• List of inscriptions in biblical archaeology
• Mari tablets
• Mutbaal
• New Chronology (Rohl)
• See the town of "Lakiša", Lachish, for "find" of one tablet, EA 333
• Šuwardata
• Ugaritic texts

Notes

References

• Goren, Y., Finkelstein, I. & Na'aman, N., Inscribed in Clay – Provenance Study of the Amarna Tablets and Other Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Tel Aviv: Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 2004. ISBN 965-266-020-5
• Knudtzon, Jørgen Alexander (1915). Die El-Amarna-Tafeln. Vol. 1. Leipzig.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Knudtzon, Jørgen Alexander (1915). Die El-Amarna-Tafeln. Vol. 2. Leipzig.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Smith, Janet (2011). Dust or dew: Immortality in the Ancient Near East and in Psalm 49. Eugene, OR, US: Wipf and Stock. p. 286. ISBN 978-1-60899-661-2.

Further reading

• Aruz, Joan, Kim Benzel, and Jean M. Evans, eds. Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
• Cohen, Raymond, and Raymond Westbrook, eds. Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
• Moran, William L. The Amarna Letters. English-language ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
• Mynářová, Jana. Language of Amarna – Language of Diplomacy: Perspectives On the Amarna Letters. Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology; Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, 2007.
• Petrie, W. M. Flinders Syria and Egypt From the Tell El Amarna Letters. Worcester, U.K.: Yare Egyptology, 2004.
• Rainey, Anson F. Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets: A Linguistic Analysis of the Mixed Dialect Used by Scribes from Canaan. 4 vols. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010.
• Rainey, Anson F., and William M. Schniedewind. The El-Amarna Correspondence: A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters From the Site of El-Amarna Based On Collations of All Extant Tablets. Boston: Brill, 2014.
• Vita, Juan-Pablo. Canaanite Scribes In the Amarna Letters. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2015.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Amarna letters.

• "The Tell el-Amarna Tablets" . Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913.
• CDLI, Chicago Digital Library Listing of the Amarna letters
• Electronic version of the Amarna tablets, Akkadian in English transliteration.
• High-resolution images, from the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin.
• Mineralogical and Chemical Study of the Amarna Tablets – Provenance Study of the Amarna Tablets – University of Tel Aviv web page
• Sample letter
• Text of some letters, archive.org