Amarna Letters

Background

In the fourteenth century BC, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV of the New Kingdom of Egypt changed his name to Akhenaten. He promoted the worship of the Aten, the god of the sun disk, and founded a new capital, Akhetaten, on the middle Nile. The site of this city is present-day Tell el-Amarna, from which the letters take their name.

At that time Egypt held the city-states of Canaan and southern Syria as vassals (subject rulers who owed loyalty to Egypt). Around them lay great powers such as Mitanni, the Hittites, Babylon, and Assyria. In diplomacy among these states, it was customary to write in Akkadian, the language of Mesopotamia, using cuneiform (a script formed by pressing wedge-shaped marks into clay).

Discovery and Publication

• 1887: The tablets are reported to have been found by chance by local residents near Amarna. They were dispersed through the antiquities market and are now divided among collections in Berlin, the British Museum in London, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and elsewhere.
• 1891–1892: The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated Amarna and recovered additional tablets.
• 1907–1915: The Norwegian scholar J. A. Knudtzon published an edition of the texts. The "EA" numbers he assigned remain the standard reference system today.

About 380 tablets are known. Most are letters, and they are thought to date from a span of several decades extending from the late reign of Amenhotep III through the reign of Akhenaten. The letters fall into two broad groups:

• Great-power correspondence: The kings of the great powers addressed the pharaoh as "brother" and discussed royal marriages and the exchange of gold and gifts.
• Vassal correspondence: Rulers in Canaan and Syria pledged their loyalty while accusing neighboring rulers and requesting military assistance. Rib-Hadda of Byblos is known to have sent more than sixty letters. Other correspondents include Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem (written "Urusalim" in the texts), Labaya of Shechem, and Biridiya of Megiddo. Several letters complain that groups called the "Habiru" (Apiru) were disrupting order in the land.

Significance and Influence

• Diplomatic history: The letters document an international order in which the great powers of the ancient Near East treated one another as equals.
• Linguistic history: Canaanite scribes wrote Akkadian mixed with vocabulary and grammar from their own language. The letters therefore provide evidence for the study of ancient Canaanite speech, which was closely related to Hebrew.
• Biblical background: The letters are frequently cited as showing that Canaan at the time was divided into small city-states and that Jerusalem already existed under that name.

Assessment

The most widely discussed question is the relationship between the Habiru and the Hebrews. Because the two names sound similar, some early researchers identified them as the same group.

The "early date" view, based on 1 Kings 6:1, places the Exodus in the fifteenth century BC. Some conservative biblical scholars who hold this view connect the activity of the Habiru with Joshua's conquest of Canaan.

Proponents of the "late date" view, which places the Exodus in the thirteenth century BC, along with the majority of scholars, interpret the evidence differently. The term Habiru appears in texts from many parts of the Near East over several centuries. For this reason they regard it as designating not a particular ethnic group but a social class, such as wanderers or mercenaries, and they understand the Amarna Letters as sources depicting Canaan before the Israelite settlement.

Whichever view one follows, there is broad agreement that the Amarna Letters are an important primary source for understanding the historical background of the Old Testament.