Amarna Letters

The Amarna Letters are an archive of roughly 380 clay tablets, most of them diplomatic correspondence written in Akkadian cuneiform, the international lingua franca of the Late Bronze Age, exchanged over about thirty years in the mid-fourteenth century BC between the Egyptian royal court and its vassal rulers and fellow great powers across Canaan, Amurru, Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni and the Hittite realm. Discovered in 1887 by local villagers at Akhetaten (modern Tell el-Amarna), the short-lived capital built by the pharaoh Akhenaten, the letters preserve an unusually candid, day-to-day picture of Late Bronze Age international relations: vassal princes pleading for gold and troops, accusations of treachery between neighboring city-states, and the marriage diplomacy binding Egypt to Babylon and Mitanni. Because so few comparable archives from this period survive intact, the letters remain one of the principal primary sources for the political history and diplomatic practice of the Near East on the eve of the Bronze Age Collapse.