Letter from Ashur-uballit, king of Assyria, to the ruler of Egypt (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In 1887, an Egyptian woman made a remarkable discovery amid the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s ancient capital, a site now known as Amarna. Hidden beneath the sands, she unearthed a cache of nearly 400 clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform—correspondence between Egypt’s pharaohs and the great powers of the day, including the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians.
Dating to the mid-14th century B.C.E., during the reigns of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, these texts—now called the Amarna Letters—constitute the only discovered royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt.
They offer a glimpse into a vibrant diplomatic world, revealing royal marriages, elaborate negotiations, exchanges of luxury gifts, political maneuvering, and appeals from the vassal kings of Canaan.
Eric Cline, author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed and professor of classics, history, and anthropology at George Washington University, traces the competition among antiquities dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, the scholarly race between British and German teams to decipher them, and the colonial-era context in which they were unearthed.
Through the lens of The Amarna Letters, Cline explores the complex web of alliances and rivalries that defined the Late Bronze Age and the ambitions, anxieties, and diplomatic theater of the ancient world.
Cline’s book Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed (Princeton University Press) is available for purchase.
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