The Armarna Letters to Pharaoh of Egypt

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The following remarkable letter was written on clay tablet between the years of 1350 and 1335, BC, by Ayyab – king of the city of Aštartu in the Canaan region – and sent to Amenhotep IV, then-Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. It was discovered in the 1880s in Amarna, and is just one of 382 such Cuneiform tablets known collectively as the Amarna letters. The image below shows the first 14 of this particular letter’s 28 lines of text, all written in the ancient language of Akkadian.

ranslated transcript follows.

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Justified War

To the king, my lord.

Message of Ayyab, your servant.

I fall at the feet of my lord 7 times and 7 times. I am the servant of the king, my lord, the dirt at his feet. I have heard what the king, my lord, wrote to me through Atahmaya. Truly, I have guarded very carefully, the cities of the king, my lord. Moreover, note that it is the ruler of Hasura who has taken 3 cities from me. From the time I heard and verified this, there has been waging of war against him. Truly, may the king, my lord, take cognizance, and may the king, my lord, give thought to his servant.
https://www.roughdiplomacy.com/?p=7


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The Amarna letters (/əˈmɑːnə/; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA) are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom, between c. 1360-1332 BC (see here for dates). The letters were found in Upper Egypt at Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten (el-Amarna), founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s – 1330s BC) during the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are mostly written in Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, rather than that of ancient Egypt. The known tablets total 382: 24 tablets had been recovered since the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's landmark edition of the Amarna letters, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, published in two volumes (1907 and 1915).[1] The written correspondence spans a period of at most thirty years.

The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics, since they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in pre-biblical times. The letters, though written in Akkadian, are heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who spoke an early form of Canaanite, the language family which would later evolve into its daughter languages, Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarna_letters
 
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