The Amarna Letters

An ancient inscription identified some of the ruins at el Amarna as "The Place of the Letters of the Pharaoh." Discovered there, circa 1887, were nearly four hundred cuneiform tablets containing correspondence of the Egyptian court with rulers of neighboring states in the mid-fourteenth century B.C. Previous translations of these letters were both incomplete and reflected an imperfect understanding of the Babylonian dialects in which they were written. William Moran devoted a lifetime of study to the Amarna letters to prepare this authoritative English translation. The letters provide a vivid record of high-level diplomatic exchanges that, by modern standards, are often less than diplomatic. An Assyrian ruler complains that the Egyptian king's latest gift of gold was not even sufficient to pay the cost of the messengers who brought it. The king of Babylon refuses to give his daughter in marriage to the pharaoh without first having proof that the king's sister—already one of the pharaoh's many wives—is still alive and well. The king of Karaduniyash complains that the Egyptian court has "detained" his messenger—for the past six years. And Egyptian vassal Rib-Hadda, writing from the besieged port of Byblos, repeatedly demands military assistance for his city or, failing that, an Egyptian ship to permit his own escape.

The El-Amarna Correspondence offers a completely new edition of the Amarna Letters based on personal inspection and reading of all the extant tablets. This edition includes new transcriptions and a translation along with an extensive introduction and glossary of the Amarna Letters.

The Amarna letters from Canaan offer us a unique glimpse of the historical and linguistic panorama of the Levant in the middle of the fourteenth century BCE. Their evidence regarding verbs is crucial for the historical and comparative study of the Semitic languages. Proper evaluation of this evidence requires an understanding of its scribal origin and nature. For this reason, The Verb in the Amarna Letters from Canaan addresses the historical circumstances in which the linguistic code of the letters was born and the unique characteristics of this system. The author adduces second-language acquisition as a proper framework for understanding the development of this language by scribes who were educated in centers on the cuneiform periphery. In this way, the book advances a novel interpretation: the letters testify to a scribal interlanguage that was born of the local use of cuneiform and was affected by the fossilization and transfer processes taking place in these language learners. This vision of the linguistic system of the letters as the learners' interlanguage informs the main part of the book, which is devoted to verbal morphology and semantics. The chapter on morphology offers an overview of conjugation patterns and morphemes in terms of paradigms. Employing a variationist approach, it also analyzes the bases on which the verbal forms were constructed. Next, the individual uses of each form are illustrated by numerous examples that provide readers with a basis for discovering alternative interpretations. The systemic view of each form and the various insights that permeate this book provide invaluable data for the historical and comparative study of the West Semitic verbal system, particularly of ancient Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Arabic.

Published in 1992, William L. Moran's definitive English translation, The Amarna Letters, raised as many questions as it answered. How did Pharaoh run his empire? Why did the god-king consent to deal with his fellow, mortal monarchs as equals? Indeed, why did kings engage in diplomacy at all? How did the great powers maintain international peace and order? In Amarna Diplomacy, Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook have brought together a team of specialists, both social scientists and ancient historians, to explore the world of ancient Near Eastern statecraft portrayed in the letters. Subjects discussed include Egyptian imperial and foreign policy, international law and trade, geopolitics and decision making, intelligence, and diplomacy. This book will be of interest to scholars not only of the ancient Near East and the Bible but also of international relations and diplomatic studies. Contributors are Pinhas Artzi, Kevin Avruch, Geoffrey Berridge, Betsy M. Bryan, Raymond Cohen, Steven R. David, Daniel Druckman, Serdar Güner, Alan James, Christer Jönsson, Mario Liverani, Samuel A. Meier, William J. Murnane, Nadav Na'aman, Rodolfo Ragionieri, Raymond Westbrook, and Carlo Zaccagnini.

"The acknowledged master of these texts is William Moran, who produced a complete re-edition of the tablets, in French, in 1987. The Amarna Letters is a revised version of this, done into English. Open it, and hear these voices from a vanished empire speak after three and a half millennia." -- Times Literary Supplement

The Amarna Letters are a collection of clay tablets found in the ruins of El Amarna, Egypt, in the 1880s. The city of El Amarna was built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, during his religious reforms in the 1340s BC, but was then abandoned after he died and Egypt reverted to worshiping the old gods. These letters provide a unique glimpse into a period of Egyptian history, that the Egyptians themselves attempted to erase. After Akhenaten's heir Tutankhamen died, his successor Ay was only able to hold the throne for a few years before Horemheb seized it, and attempted to reunite the Egyptians by erasing all records of Akhenaten's reforms, which included erasing Akhenaten's name from almost every record in Egypt. By this period, El Amarna appears to have already been mostly abandoned, and therefore Egyptologists were able to reconstruct the strange story of Akhenaten's reign, in the middle of the New Kingdom era. The Amarna letters were recovered from the royal archives in El Amarna, where they appear to have been archived after having been translated for the royal court. The letters are inscribed on clay tablets in Cuneiform, the dominant form of writing in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and the neighboring cultures in Anatolia and Cyprus at the time. The shape of the Cuneiform logograms used is Akkadian, the parent form of the later Neo-Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, and Ugaritic forms of Cuneiform, however, the language used in the Letters is not pure Akkadian. The Letters are between various members of the Egyptian royal court, and many different cities and nations across the Middle East, including Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni, and Cyprus, and therefore the language within the Letters is not consistent. Within the letters from Canaanite cities, all of which were subject to Egypt at the time, several transliterated names are also used, which appears to be a direct precursor to the later development of Ugaritic Cuneiform by 1200 BC, which was an abjad similar to the Canaanite script that was developed by 1000 BC, however, used Cuneiform logograms instead of alphabet-like letters. The surviving letters were mostly about trade and diplomacy, however, do include a great deal of information about what was happening in the Middle East at the time. In particular, they demonstrate how limited Egypt's actual control of its Canaanite holdings was, where the governors of cities were constantly requesting military help to defend themselves against each other, the marauding Habirus, and the Hittite-backed Amorites in northern Canaan. The Amarna Letters were written during the mid-1330s BC, during the reigns of the Pharaohs Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, although it is not always clear when in their respective reigns the letters were written, or even which pharaoh was on the throne at the time.

Examines letters from the Tell el-Amarna archive in Egypt, written between Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations ca. 1360-1334 B.C. Uses material and chemical analysis for provenance information and historical geography.