ANES 39 (2002) 44-75 The {Amârnah Texts a Century after Flinders Petrie Anson F. RAINEY International Visiting Research Scholar Centre for Classics and Archaeology University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 AUSTRALIA E-mail: [email protected] Abstract The ensuing remarks seek to elucidate some of the central issues in the study of the cuneiform texts discovered at Tell el-¨Amârnah in Egypt. Progress in the study of the language, the social structure of Canaan at that time and certain historical problems will be reviewed. After an accidental find by a village woman in 1887. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie was the first modern scholar to conduct archaeological excavations at the actual site. His work determined the probable spot where the tablets had been deposited when the ancient town was abandoned. Subsequently, Petrie articulated various interpretations of the evidence from the archaeological finds and also from the inscriptions. During the twentieth century, research was continued on all the many facets of these momentous discoveries. The focus in this paper is on the cuneiform epistles, the international and parochial correspondence that involved the Egyptian gov- ernment.* * The present article is an expansion of the ‘2002 Flinders Petrie Oration,’ delivered on behalf of the Australian Institute of Archaeology and the Archaeological Research Unit, The School of Ecology and Environment, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia, on 30 August, 2002. A much shorter version had been presented under the title, ‘The ¨Amârnah Tablets — A Late Bronze Age Phenomenon,’ at the Joint Meeting of the Midwest Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Middle West Branch of the American Oriental Society and the American Schools of Oriental Research—Midwest, Wheaton, IL., 16-18 February, 1997. Subsequently, a Hebrew translation was published as pp. 391-408 in Talshir, Z., Yonah, Sh. and Sivan, D, eds., Homage to Shmuel, Studies in the World of the Bible; Beer Sheva¨: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press; Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2001 (Hebrew). It is a pleasant duty to thank Christopher Davey, Director of the Australian Institute of Archaeology, for the opportunity of presenting the “2002 Flinders Petrie Oration” during my stay as a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Melbourne. {AMARNAH TEXTS AFTER PETRIE 45 A central component in the cultural and political life of the Ancient Near Eastern Late Bronze Age is the collection of cuneiform documents known as the ¨Amârnah Tablets. The semi-legendary accounts of their dis- covery one hundred and fifteen years ago are generally well known to the scholarly world but less so today to the general public.1 The tablets found by the ¨Amârnah villagers and those discovered subsequently2 have gradually opened up to us a whole world of international relations, cultural intercourse and social ferment. According to the generally accepted tradition, a village woman discovered the main collection of texts when looking for good organic soil for her garden. Ultimately the texts were scattered throughout the world in various museums and private collections. Of the approximately 350 texts in the initial find, the lion's share wound up in the ‘Pergamon' Museum in Berlin, some eighty or so found their way to the British Museum, while only about fifty were retrieved for the Bulaq Museum in Cairo (they are now in the Cairo Museum). A few showed up in private collections or in museums in Paris, Brussels, Moscow, New York and the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. Sir W. M. F. Petrie had spent the 1890 season examining Tell el-Îesi on the southern inner coastal plain of Palestine on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund. After establishing a typological sequence for the ceram- ics he found there, he returned to Egypt where he had finally obtained a permit to excavate at Tell el-¨Amârnah (the name was an artificial creation derived from a misunderstanding of the local toponyms: et-Tîl and Banî ¨Amrân). He dug there during the 1891-92 season while his successor at Tell el Îesi, Fredrick Bliss, began a stratigraphic excavation, the first ever con- ducted in Palestine. So 1891-92 saw the discovery of a handful of fragmen- tary texts at ¨Amârnah itself, while Bliss found a similar text at Îesi! The latter was eventually included with the ¨Amârnah tablets in Knudtzon's edi- tion as EA 333. The Îesi text is now in the Istanbul Museum. It is the only letter not discovered with the ¨Amârnah finds included in that edition. This was justified, however, since EA 333 refers to two people who were known as rulers of Lachish in other ¨Amârnah letters. Petrie had come up with a small collection of texts and fragments, mainly scribal exercises or other ‘scholarly' texts of a literary character. His texts were given to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In recent years, rainwater accidently penetrated a display case and dissolved a few of the Ashmolean texts. 1 Knudtzon 1915, pp. 1-15; cf. Sayce 1917 and Campbell 1964, pp. 32-34. 2 Cf. Izre'el 1997, pp. 1-9. 46 ANSON F. RAINEY The Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft found two texts during excavations at ¨Amârnah in 1913. Both were ‘scholarly,' viz. the literary Sar tamÌari (EA 359) about a legendary campaign by Sargon of Akkad into Anatolia. The other (EA 379) was a short lexical list. They were taken to Berlin but the literary text was ‘repatriated' to Cairo in 1924. The Egypt Exploration Society came to dig there in 1920-21 and found a sort of lexical text (EA 368) with some Egyptian words in syllabic cuneiform script; it is in the British Museum. Further British excavations, led by Leonard Woolley and J. D. S. Pendlebury in 1933-34 produced a few epistles which are also in the British museum today. Some of the privately owned texts have subsequently been purchased by the British museum. An additional text (EA 367) was found at the British Museum in the drawer of the late Sydney Smith and published in 1965 (EA 378). An alleged ¨Amârnah text, called EA 382, was shown by my collation in February, 2000, not to belong to the ¨Amârnah corpus. The details of its arrival at the British Museum are obscure and the assignment to ¨Amârnah had only been tentative. So now we have 381 texts, thirty two ‘scholarly,' and 349 let- ters.3 Flinders Petrie was ably suited to excavate the one period site of Tell el-¨Amârnah because of his emphasis on small finds. Today the collection of his objects from the site, augmented by a few other items, is perhaps the best teaching collection in the world.4 After the publication of H. Winckler's translation of all the ¨Amârnah texts known by the end of the nineteenth century,5 Petrie also wrote a small monograph in which he gave his own interpretations of the letters (dependent on the translations, of course) and the historical situation in Canaan and in the Ancient Near East.6 Suffice it to remark that Petrie's conception of that fourteenth century world leaves much to be desired. It may be unfair to judge him a century later but other scholars, using J. A. Knudtzon's translations, especially O. Weber, succeeded in giving us a much more accurate picture.7 Petrie was especially notorious for his impossible suggestions pertaining to historical geography. He did not even agree that Gubla, the city of Rib-Haddi in nearly seventy letters, was ancient Byblos! During the same year that Petrie's monograph appeared, there was published a brilliant exposition of the geographical names, based 3 For discussions of the publication history of the texts, cf. Rainey 1978, pp. 5-7; Moran 1992, pp. xiii-xviii. Izre'el (1997) has collated and republished all the “scholarly” texts. 4 Cf. Jean Capart cited by Samson 1972, p. 14. 5 Winckler 1896. 6 Petrie 1907. 7 Weber 1915. {AMARNAH TEXTS AFTER PETRIE 47 on thorough linguistic knowledge.8 Today, the geographical evidence has been further advanced.9 The second century of ¨Amârnah research has now entered its second decade. Perhaps it would not be inappropriate to point out some of the prin- cipal areas in which this collection of texts has contributed to our under- standing of the Late Bronze Age. Language Diachronic status. It must have been something of a shock to western scholars when they finally realized that the Egyptians really did use Akka- dian as a diplomatic language. But in the 1890's when the ¨Amârnah texts became available to them in reasonable editions, the study of the native Akkadian dialects was still in its infancy. The standard in the profession was mainly that of the Assyrian royal inscriptions and of other texts from Asshurbanipal's library or from the display inscriptions of other Assyrian monarchs. The Code of ¨Ammurapi, composed in classical Old Babylonian, was only discovered at the end of that decade and its syntactical and gram- matical analysis was achieved a few years later.10 In Knudtzon's monumental edition completed in 1915, it became appar- ent that he had normalized ideograms and transcribed various syllabic signs in accordance with his knowledge of Assyrian hymns to Samas.11 Thus Knudtzon wrote sisê for ANSE.KUR.RA.MES and Òâbê for ERÍN.MES as in the Assyrian plural ending. He also translated the UD sign in final posi- tion by tú as frequently in Assyrian inscriptions. This led to considerable confusion with regard to the case markers on nominal forms in the ¨Amâr- nah texts. However, Knudtzon recognized his error after his transcriptions had gone to press12; the sign in final position should usually be read tam or 13 on words without mimation, ta5.