The Amarna Archives

An archive of royal records of Amenhotep III was found in Tell el-Amarna, which contains the ruins of the city once called Akhetaten (meaning “Horizon of the Solar Disk”).10

Amenhotep III’s heretic son, Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten, had built it in the mid-fourteenth century BC as a new capital city.

Akhenaten was Amenhotep III’s successor, probably serving as coruler with his father for a few years before Amenhotep died in 1353 BC.

Soon after assuming sole power, Akhenaten implemented what is now called the “Amarna Revolution.” He closed down the temples belonging to Ra, Amun, and other major deities, seized their vast treasuries, and generated for himself unrivaled power, as the head of the government, military, and religion. He condemned the worship of every Egyptian deity except Aten, the disk of the sun, whom he—and he alone—was allowed to worship directly.

This is sometimes seen as the first attempt at monotheism, since seemingly only one god was worshipped, but in fact the matter is quite debatable (and has been the subject of numerous scholarly discussions). For the ordinary Egyptians, there were essentially two gods: Aten and Akhenaten, for the people were allowed to pray only to Akhenaten; he then prayed to Aten on their behalf. Akhenaten may have been a religious heretic, and perhaps even a fanatic to a certain degree, but he was also calculating and a powermonger rather than a zealot.

His religious revolution may actually have been a shrewd political and diplomatic move, designed to restore the power of the king: power that had slowly been lost to the priests during the reigns of previous pharaohs.

But Akhenaten did not undo everything that his ancestors had put into place. In particular, he recognized the importance of maintaining international relationships, especially with the kings of the lands surrounding Egypt. Akhenaten carried on his father’s tradition of diplomatic negotiations and trade partnerships with foreign powers, both high and low, including those with Suppiluliuma and the Hittites.11 He kept an archive of the correspondence with these kings and governors in his capital city, Akhetaten. These are the so-called Amarna Letters, inscribed on clay tablets, which the peasant woman accidentally uncovered in 1887.

The archive was originally housed in the “records office” of the city. It is a treasure trove of correspondence with kings and governors with whom both Amenhotep and his son Akhenaten had diplomatic relationships, including Cypriot and Hittite rulers, and Babylonian and Assyrian kings. There are also letters to and from the local Canaanite rulers, including Abdi-Hepa of Jerusalem and Biridiya of Megiddo. The letters from these local rulers, who were usually vassals of the Egyptians, are full of requests for Egyptian help, but those sent between the rulers of the Great Powers (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Mitanni, and the Hittites) are more frequently filled with requests and mentions of gifts made on a much higher diplomatic level. This Amarna archive, along with that found at Mari from the eighteenth 88 century BC, is among the first in the history of the world to document the substantial and sustained international relations of the Bronze Age in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean.12 The letters were written in Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca of the day used in international relations, on nearly four hundred clay tablets. Having been sold on the antiquities market at the time of their discovery, the tablets are now dispersed among museums in England, Egypt, the United States, and Europe, including the British Museum in London, the Cairo Museum in Egypt, the Louvre in Paris, the Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago, the Pushkin Museum in Russia, and the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin (which has almost two-thirds of the tablets).13

GREETING-GIFTS AND FAMILY RELATIONS

These letters, including copies of those sent to the foreign rulers and replies from those rulers, provide us with insights into trading and international connections in the time of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten during the mid-fourteenth century BC. It is apparent that much of the contact involved “gift giving” conducted at the very highest levels—from one king to another. For instance, one Amarna Letter, sent to Amenhotep III by Tushratta, the king of Mitanni in northern Syria who came to the throne about 1385 BC, opens with a paragraph containing traditional greetings and then goes on to discuss the gifts that he has sent, brought by his messengers:

Say to Nibmuareya [Amenhotep III], the king of Egypt, my brother: Thus [says] Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, your brother. For me, all goes well. For you, may all go well. For Kelu-Hepa [your wife], may all go well. For your household, for your wives, for your sons, for your magnates [chief men], for your warriors, for your horses, for your chariots, and in your country, may all go very well . . .

I herewith send you 1 chariot, 2 horses, 1 male attendant, 1 female attendant, from the booty from the land of Hatti. As the greeting-gift of my brother, I send you 5 chariots, 5 teams of horses. And as the greeting-gift of Kelu-Hepa, my sister, I send her 1 set of gold toggle-pins, 1 set of gold earrings, 1 gold mašuring, and a scent container that is full of “sweet oil.” I herewith send Keliya, my chief minister, and Tunip-ibri. May my brother let them go promptly so they can report back to me promptly, and I hear the greeting of my brother and rejoice. May my brother seek friendship with me, and may my brother send his messengers to me that they may bring my brother’s greetings to me and I hear them.14

Another royal letter, from Akhenaten to Burna-Buriash II, the Kassite king of Babylon, includes a detailed list of the gifts that he has sent. The itemization of the gifts takes up more than three hundred lines of writing on the tablet. Included are objects of gold, copper, silver, and bronze, containers of perfume and sweet oil, finger-rings, foot-bracelets, necklaces, thrones, mirrors, linen cloth, stone bowls, and ebony boxes.15 Similar detailed letters with comparable long lists of objects, sometimes sent as part of a dowry accompanying a daughter and sometimes just sent as gifts, come from other kings, such as Tushratta of Mitanni.16 We should also note that the “messengers” referred to in these, and other, letters were often ministers, essentially sent as ambassadors, but were frequently also merchants, apparently serving double duty for both themselves and the king.

In these letters, the kings involved often referred to each other as relatives, calling one another “brother” or “father/son,” even though usually they were not actually related, thereby creating “trade partnerships.”17 Anthropologists have noted that such efforts to create imaginary family relationships happen most frequently in preindustrial societies, specifically to solve the problem of trading when there are no kinship ties or statesupervised markets.18 Thus, a king of Amurru wrote to the neighboring king of Ugarit (both areas were located in coastal northern Syria): “My brother, look: I and you, we are brothers. Sons of a single man, we are brothers. Why should we not be on good terms with each other? Whatever desire you will write to me, I will satisfy it; and you will satisfy my desires. We form a unit.”19

It should be emphasized that these two kings (of Amurru and Ugarit) were not necessarily related at all, even by marriage. Not all were, and not all appreciated this shortcut approach to diplomatic relations. The Hittites of Anatolia seem to have been especially prickly in this regard, for one Hittite king wrote to another king: “Why should I write to you in terms of brotherhood? Are we sons of the same mother?”20

It is not always clear what relationship merits use of the term “brother,” as opposed to “father” and “son,” but it usually seems to indicate equality in status or in age, with “father/son” being reserved to show respect. The Hittite kings, for instance, use “father” and “son” more frequently in their correspondence than do the rulers of any other major Near Eastern power, while the Amarna Letters employ almost entirely the term “brother,” whether for the mighty king of Assyria or the less-powerful king of Cyprus. It seems that the Egyptian pharaohs regarded the other Near Eastern kings, their trade partners, as members of an international brotherhood, regardless of age or years on the throne.21

In some cases, however, the two kings were actually related by marriage. For instance, in letters from Tushratta of Mitanni to Amenhotep III, Tushratta refers to Amenhotep III’s wife KeluHepa as his sister, which she actually was (his father had given her in marriage to Amenhotep III). Similarly, Tushratta also gave his own daughter, Tadu-Hepa, to Amenhotep III in another arranged marriage, which made Tushratta both brother-in-law (“brother”) and father-in-law (“father”) to Amenhotep. Thus, one of his letters legitimately starts with “Say to … the king of Egypt, my brother, my son-in-law … Thus speaks Tushratta, the king of the land of Mitanni, your father-in-law.”22 After Amenhotep III’s death, Akhenaten seems to have taken (or inherited) Tadu-Hepu as one of his wives, which gave Tushratta the right to call himself father-in-law to both Amenhotep III and Akhenaten in different Amarna Letters.23

In each case, the royal marriage was arranged to cement relations and treaties between the two powers, and specifically between the two individual kings. This also therefore gave Tushratta the right to call Amenhotep III his “brother” (though, technically, he was his brother-in-law) and to expect better relations with Egypt than he might otherwise have had. The marriages were accompanied by elaborate dowries, which are recorded in several of the Amarna Letters. For instance, one letter from Tushratta to Amenhotep III, which is only partially intact and not entirely legible, still lists 241 lines of gifts, of which he himself says: “It is all of these wedding-gifts, of every sort, that Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, gave to Nimmureya [Amenhotep III], the king of Egypt, his brother and his son-in-law. He gave them at the same time that he gave Tadu-Hepa, his daughter, to Egypt and to Nimmureya to be his wife.”24

Amenhotep III seems to have utilized this diplomatic angle of dynastic marriage to a greater extent than did any other king of his time, for we know that he married, and had in his harem, the daughters of the Kassite kings Kurigalzu I and Kadashman-Enlil I of Babylon, Kings Shuttarna II and Tushratta of Mitanni, and King Tarkhundaradu of Arzawa (located in southwestern Anatolia).25 Each marriage undoubtedly cemented yet another diplomatic treaty and allowed the kings in question to practice diplomatic relations as if between family members. Some kings attempted to take advantage of the link between dynastic marriage and gift giving right away, forgoing the other niceties. For instance, one Amarna Letter, probably from the Kassite king Kadashman-Enlil of Babylon to Amenhotep III, directly combines the two, when Kadashman-Enlil writes: Moreover, you, my brother … as to the gold I wrote you about, send me whatever is on hand, as much as possible, before your messenger [comes] to me, right now, in all haste … If during this summer, during the months of Tammuz or Ab, you send the gold I wrote you about, I will give you my daughter.26 For this cavalier attitude toward his own daughter, Amenhotep III admonished Kadashman-Enlil in another letter: “It is a fine thing that you give your daughters in order to acquire a nugget of gold from your neighbors!”27 And yet, at some point during his reign, the transaction did take place, for we know from three other Amarna Letters that Amenhotep III did marry a daughter of Kadashman-Enlil, although we do not know her name.