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AMARNA LETTERS

A collection of international correspondence dating from the middle of the 14th century b.c.e. and discovered at the ancient capital of Amarna in Egypt. These texts form the bulk of the 380 separate cuneiform documents that first came to the attention of the scholarly world at the end of the 19th century. They form a partial archive of the pharaohs of Egypt and exemplify their international relations at this time. The texts are of particular interest for what they reveal concerning the social world of Syria-Palestine, the language of this region, and broader political history of the Late Bronze Age. At this time the Egyptian New Kingdom claimed Palestine and areas to the north including all of modern Lebanon and some of Syria. The correspondence from city leaders and Egyptian administrators of this region reveals a world of many small towns and city-states, each rivalling its neighbors for power and military support from the pharaoh. All leaders claimed subservience to the pharaoh, but the correspondence indicates that the town leaders were seeking their own political advantage and used every opportunity to decry their neighbors as ³abiru or disloyal to the crown. Rather than bearing witness to a deteriorating political situation, this correspondence more likely reflects the pharaoh’s efforts to play off the political and military strengths of each city-state against the other and thereby minimize the military force required to maintain Egyptian sovereignty over this region. The social world of this period has been compared with that later portrayed in the book of the Judges, in which each locality was left to struggle for its own survival.

The surviving texts record the careers of certain leaders and their families as they rise in power until the pharaoh decides they have become a threat to the political balance. This was the case of Labaya, the leader of Shechem, who seems to have gained several cities and interfered with the activities of other independent cities (e.g., Gezer). He was apparently granted his wish to visit Pharaoh, but died or was killed before reaching Egypt. Farther to the north, the kingdom of Amurru was led by a certain Azira, who became involved in dubious politics and was recalled to Egypt. Eventually he and his kingdom allied with the enemy Hittites. On the coast, Rib-addi of Byblos wrote dozens of letters to the pharaoh expecting him to intervene and rescue Rib-addi from various troubles with local enemies. In the end we read of a coup within Byblos, with Rib-addi locked out of his city.

Although most of the Amarna correspondence is written in Akkadian cuneiform, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East at this time, it is clear that letters from scribes in the cities of Palestine and adjacent regions betray local dialects in their vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and other grammatical features. In some cases West Semitic terms are placed alongside their Akkadian equivalents with an indication that they are glosses to explain the meanings of these words. In other letters they appear as part of the text with no indication that the scribes were aware they were writing anything other than the official language of correspondence. Linguists have identified various grammatical and stylistic forms as West Semitic, such as the waw-consecutive as a narrative tense, 1st common singular suffixed verbal forms, and rhetorical forms of expression that resemble later Biblical Hebrew. These include the threefold repetition of phrases and ideas, the use of chiasm, and parallelism techniques common in the Psalms and other forms of biblical poetry and prose. Texts from places such as Jerusalem and Shechem, as well as Tyre and Byblos, attest to a “Canaanite” language present in 14th-century Syria-Palestine.

The ethnic constitution of the leadership in Palestine during the Amarna Age is one of West Semitic leaders along the coast, but inland the presence of leaders with northern (Hittite and Hurrian) names occurs. Thus Jerusalem has a leader whose name contains the Hurrian goddess Hebat. This influence from Anatolia and northern Syria, perhaps also reflected in some of the population groups and individuals mentioned in Joshua, Judges and 1–2 Samuel, is an example of the international world in which the Amarna texts were written. Political messages from the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, the Hittites, and Alashiya (Cyprus) found their way to the pharaoh’s court. Each of these describes concerns for trade, whether maintaining trade routes in light of the threats of bandits and murderers, providing inventories of a vast array of luxury goods delivered to the Egyptian court in trade (officially as a “gift”), or simply seeking rights of passage through the intermediate lands and kingdoms. Here are represented an elite “club” of the most powerful nations of the age and their concerns to acquire precious goods for their own prestige. The Amarna Letters are a unique collection of documents that attest to similar trade and political concerns as were reflected later in the Israelite monarchies and decried by the prophets.

Bibliography. R. S. Hess, Amarna Personal Names. ASORDS 9 (Winona Lake, 1993); W. L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore, 1992).

Richard S. Hess

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AMARNA LETTERS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)