The Tell el-Amarna tablets

Introduction

The Bible and archaeology met through three important discoveries:
The third discovery was the chance find by a peasant woman in 1887 of over 350 clay tablets in cuneiform script at Tell El-Amarna in Egypt, the former capital of Pharaoh Amenophis IV, also known as Akhenaton.
After translation, it was discovered that they contained the diplomatic archives of the Egyptian court during the reigns of Amenophis III and Amenophis IV, the correspondence of the Canaanite «kinglets» of the 14th century BC who were vassals of the Egyptian Empire, and correspondence with the rulers of Babylon, Mitanni and Syria.

Image opposite: the head of a statue representing Amenophis III © Théo Truschel.

These various letters (tablets) addressed to the Pharaohs set out the social and political context of the Near East, helping us to understand the period that some historians believe corresponds to the «settlement» of the Hebrews in Canaan.

Its presentation

Amarna (Tell el-Amarna or el-Amarna) is the archaeological site of the ruins of Akhetaton, the capital built by Pharaoh Akhenaton around 1360 BC.
The Arabic name Tell el-Amarna is probably a contraction of the names of the present-day village, el-Till, and of a nomadic tribe, the Beni Amran, who left the desert in the 18th century to settle on the banks of the Nile. Akhetaton means «The Horizon of Aten» in ancient Egyptian.

Image opposite: bust of Nefertiti, Akhenaten's famous wife. © Théo Truschel.

At this point, between Thebes and Memphis, the high cliffs of the Arabian chain on the right bank of the Nile diverge from the river to form a hemicycle twelve kilometers long. It was here, in year 4 of his reign (circa 1360 BC), that Akhenaten laid the foundations of the city that was to be the capital of the Egyptian empire for a quarter of a century. Dedicated to the cult of the single god Aten, the city was quickly built in mud bricks and talatates; four years after its foundation, it was already inhabited by a large population, estimated to number at least twenty thousand. Boundary stelae demarcated the city's territory. On one of them, the king proclaims that Aten himself had chosen this location because it was untouched by the presence of any other divinity. When Tutankhamun left Akhetaten to return to Thebes, the city was abandoned, dismantled by Akhenaten's successors and covered by sand.
Akhetaton is the only city in ancient Egypt of which we have detailed knowledge, not least because it was deserted shortly after Akhenaten's death, never to be occupied again. However, because of its exceptional character and the conditions under which the city was created and then abandoned, it is difficult to know to what extent «Aton's Horizon» was representative of Egyptian town planning.

Discovering tablets

The discovery of the tablets is attributed to an Egyptian woman who, while digging, discovered these antiquities around 1887; she sold them on the market. After the discovery site was located, numerous excavations took place. William Matthew Flinders Petrie found numerous tablets between 1891 and 1892, in the form of twenty-one fragments. Émile Chassinat, director of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale (IFAO) in Cairo, acquired two more tablets in 1903. Since Knudtzon's 1907 edition, twenty-four new tablets have been found or identified. Nevertheless, it is known that some of the letters found by clandestine excavators have irretrievably disappeared, as some cuneiform specialists initially mistook these tablets for forgeries, as they couldn't see what cuneiform tablets would have done in Egypt, and rejected them.
The tablets found at Amarna are kept in museums in Cairo, Europe and the USA; over two hundred are in the Vorderasiatischen Museum in Berlin; fifty are in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; seven in the Louvre Museum; three in the Moscow Museum; one in the collection of the Oriental Institute in Chicago.

Image opposite: one of the «Letters» unearthed at Tell el-Amarna, written in Akkadian cuneiform, is on display at Berlin's Neues Museum. On this tablet, the king of Jerusalem, Abdi-Hepa, appeals for help against the foreign invaders ‘Apiru. Neues Museum Berlin.

Correspondence between great kings
A first set of el Amarna correspondence tablets concerns letters exchanged by the kings of Egypt with the great foreign courts of the time: Babylon (14 letters received), Assyria (two letters), Mittani (fifteen letters), the Hittites (four letters), Arzawa (two letters) and Alashiya (Cyprus, eight letters).

A view of the few remaining vestiges of Amarna; the small temple of Aten © Einsamer Schütze.