The Amarna letters (sometimes Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets) are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at Amarna, the modern name for the 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, being mostly written in Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia rather than ancient Egypt. The known tablets currently total 382 in number, 24 further tablets having been recovered since the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's landmark edition of the Amarna correspondence, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln in two volumes (1907 and 1915). The correspondence spans a period of at most thirty years.
Read more about Amarna Letters: The Letters, Amarna Letters List
Famous quotes containing the word letters:
“Two months dead, I wrestle with your name
Whose separate letters make a paltry sum
That is not you.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)