History of the Ancient Near East · Part 10 · The age of the great kings · B1–B2
Egypt, the Amarna Letters and Canaan
Part 10 of History of the Ancient Near East: in the 14th century BCE, the kings of Canaan were servants of the pharaoh, and they wrote to him on clay, in Babylonian cuneiform. One of them was the king of a small hill town called Urusalim. Formal requests (may the king send…, I beg you to…) and the present perfect for news (the Habiru have taken the cities), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, letters. Not poems, not laws: real letters, from real kings who were frightened, angry and short of soldiers.
To Egypt. To the pharaoh. Before Israel was a kingdom, Canaan belonged to Egypt.
To Egypt? Then we Jews of Alexandria live in the very land that once ruled Canaan, though our city did not exist yet. That is a strange thought.
From about 1550 BCE, the pharaohs of Egypt’s New Kingdom ruled Canaan, the land between Egypt and Syria. Canaan was divided into small city-states, each with its own king, but these kings were the pharaoh’s vassals: they paid tribute, and Egyptian governors and soldiers lived in towns such as Gaza and Beth-Shean. Egyptian rule lasted until about 1150 BCE.
In 1887, villagers digging for old mud-brick to use as fertiliser at Amarna, in Middle Egypt, found hundreds of clay tablets. Amarna had been the new capital of the pharaoh Akhenaten. The tablets were his foreign office’s letters: from the great kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and the Hittites, and from the small kings of Canaan and Syria. About 380 survive.
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