The Amarna Letters are among some of the earliest known diplomatic records written between pharaohs in the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt and the Amurru rulers of Canaan during the 14th century BC.
The following remarkable letter was written on clay tablet between the years of 1350 and 1335, BC, by Ayyab – king of the city of Aštartu in the Canaan region – and sent to Amenhotep IV, then-Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. It was discovered in the 1880s in Amarna, and is just one of 382 such Cuneiform tablets known collectively as the Amarna letters. The image below shows the first 14 of this particular letter’s 28 lines of text, all written in the ancient language of Akkadian.
Translated transcript follows.
Justified War
To the king, my lord.
Message of Ayyab, your servant.
I fall at the feet of my lord 7 times and 7 times. I am the servant of the king, my lord, the dirt at his feet. I have heard what the king, my lord, wrote to me through Atahmaya. Truly, I have guarded very carefully, the cities of the king, my lord. Moreover, note that it is the ruler of Hasura who has taken 3 cities from me. From the time I heard and verified this, there has been waging of war against him. Truly, may the king, my lord, take cognizance, and may the king, my lord, give thought to his servant.
Following the Battle of Kadesh in c. 1274 BC during the Nineteenth dynasty, the pharaoh of Egypt and the ruler of the Hittite Empire created one of the first known international peace treaties which survives in stone tablet fragments, now generally called the Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty.
Ancient artifacts and ruins find their importance in what they can tell us about the past. Trained archeologists can make impressive deductions ,from as little evidence as a few shards of pottery, or some discarded beads, or even just some impressions on the floor. Writings are better than these , as they provide more to analyze by content, what may be missing, and the style in which they are written all provide clues to the past.
Furthermore, the letters didn’t spring from the sea. Men like the one pictured above trained for a lifetime of reading and writing. Not only were the scripts of ancient Egypt extremely complex in and of itself, but there were modifications to them based upon the cause of their writing. For example, all signs referring to living beings were removed from the writing in the temple of Teti, yet the words were modified so that the meaning was still intelligible (Donadoni 1997:63).
However, scribes were not necessarily the elite.
Though the literacy rate was roughly 1%, scribal training was often merely the path to a more elevated career in medicine, religion, or law. Though the income was likely not particularly high, there was still a certain pride of being a scribe, as they were not subordinate to any other trades, while all comparable trades were. However, by the time of the New Kingdom (which is when Tell el-Amarna dates from), scribes had become the intelligentsia of the society, and produced written texts for their own purposes, rather than merely those of the state or the temple. This is also the time period in which foreign correspondence became largely written, instead of the oral messenger system used previously (Donadoni 1997:77).
This leads to the peculiar importance of the Amarna letters. Not only are they a unique find, but they are as old as such a find could logically be. An analysis of the letters reveals the political maneuverings of both Amenhoptep III and Akhenaten, the general disposition of foreign states, the gifts exchanged between the great powers to maintain the peace, and what the Pharaoh could expect from his vassals. Simply put, the Amarna letters show us a glimpse of the world of Akhenaten that’s even clearer than that shown by the ruins of his great city.