Amarna Tablets

From ArchaeoWiki

The Amarna Tablets are an important corpus of 382 tablets recovered from the site of el-Amarna in Egypt. The corpus is frequently referred to by the name better deserving of its largest component—the Amarna Letters—although the collection also includes inventories and scholarly texts.

The Amarna corpus is usually divided into three categories:

• the International Correspondence
• the Vassal Correspondence
• the Scholarly Tablets

Contents 1 Discovery 2 Distribution 3 Bibliography 3.1 Text Editions 3.2 Derivative Studies 3.3 Articles

Discovery

Sir Flinders Petrie discovered an additional 22 tablet fragments in 1891-1892; these he dispatched to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

The Egypt Exploration Society discovered one tablet (EA 368) during the Amarna excavations of 1921-1924, and an additional eight tablets (EA 370 - EA 377) during the seasons 1926-1937.

Distribution

Most of the Amarna tablets eventually found their way into museum collections (in order of size of holding):

• the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin - initially 160 tablets, ultimately 202-203 (excepting 3 fragments belonging to the British Museum)
• the British Museum, London - initially 81 tablets, ultimately 95 (excepting a fragment belonging to the Vorderasiatisches Museum)
• the Egyptian Museum, Cairo - initially 31 tablets, ultimately 49-50 (excepting a fragment belonging to the British Museum)
• the Musée du Louvre, Paris - initially 1 tablet, ultimately 7

Bibliography

Text Editions

(in order of publication)

• Knudtzon, J.A. [1907-1915], Die El-Amarna Tafeln, Anmerkungen und Register bearbeitet von O. Weber und E. Ebeling, [Vorderasiatische Bibliothek Band 2], 1-2, Leipzig, 1907-1915.
• Rainey, Anson [1978], El Amarna Tablets 359-379, [AOAT 8], 2^nd ediition, Kevelaer und Neukirchen, 1978.

Derivative Studies

• Cohen, Raymond and Westbrook, Raymond (eds), Amarna Diplomacy - the Beginnings of International Relations, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2000. ISBN 0801861993

• Goren, Yuval, Finkelstein, Israel and Naʾaman, Nadav [2002], “The Seat of Three Disputed Canaanite Rulers According to Petrographic Investigation of the Amarna Tablets”, TA 29.2 (2002), pp.221-237.
• [2003], “The Expansion of the Kingdom of Amurru According to the Petrographic Examination of the Amarna Tablets”, BASOR 329 (2003), pp.3-11.
• [2004], Inscribed in Clay: Provenance Study of the Amarna Tablets and Other Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Tel Aviv: Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology, University of Tel Aviv, 2004. ISBN 9652660205

• Goren, Y., Bunimovitz, Shlomo, Finkelstein, I. and Naʾaman, N. [2003], "The Location of Alashiya: New Evidence from Petrographic Investigation of Alashiyan Tablets”, AJA 107.2 (2003), pp.233-255. html complete pdf

Articles

• Bodi, Daniel [2003], "Outraging the Resident-Alien", UF 35 (2003), pp.29-56. pdf