After exploring the Bronze Age Collapse of 1177 BC in his previous two books (reviewed in AE 85 and AE 143), Eric Cline travels back some 200 years to investigate the inter-relationships between the ‘great kings’ and vassal rulers of the Near East through their correspondence: the so-called ‘Amarna Letters’.
Of 382 clay tablets discovered at Amarna in 1887, there are 349 letters between the various ‘actors’ of the time, written in cuneiform text – mostly in the Akkadian language. Rather than providing complete translations of these letters – which appear in other publications – Cline presents an engaging chronological reconstruction of the interactions of the various players: their demands for gold and gifts, marriage negotiations, and, in the case of the petty rulers of Canaan, their intense rivalries – which he compares to the ‘protracted bickering of a large dysfunctional family’.
But this narrative only covers part of the book. Cline also explores the discovery of the letters (and the unfortunate destruction of nearly half of the tablets during their journey to Luxor and Cairo on the back of a donkey). He describes the race to decipher the texts (by Sayce and Budge in Britain, and the ‘Young Berliners’ Erman, Lehmann, and Winckler in Germany) at a time when little was known about this period, and the Akkadian language had been deciphered only three decades earlier.
Sherds CA 411