The Amarna Letters
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The Amarna Letters Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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My curiosity is satisfied!
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As Professor Moran points out in his preface, his main objective was to provide an up to date translation of "the entire corpus of Amarna letters which reflects the advances of the last 75 years." Indeed there is little or no explanation about the meanings of the events referred to in these letters. On the other hand, my somewhat incompatible objective in buying this book, was to go to the source in order to satisfy myself about the veracity or otherwise of the interpretations of some of these letters by other historians. However, and possibly because of their repetitive nature, I did get a picture of what was going on in the area of what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, during the last years of Amenhopis III and his son Akhenaten,
For me, a thorough reading of the 27 page Introductory chapter and its 140 notes turned out to be absolutely essential reading to get a general idea of the historical context of these letters. This introduction covers the following topics:
Discoveries and publications
The Archive
Language and Writing
The International Correspondence
The Vassal Correspondence
Chronology
with copious notes on the various theories and points of disagreement between many of the eminent of the scholars who have studied the tablets.
The book includes detailed translations of those tablets which are letters and inventories between the contemporary rulers and Egyptian vassals with the Pharoahs who resided at Akhetaten, the ruins of which are to be found at the site of El Amarna where the tablets were found, and which is about 190 miles south of Cairo on the East bank of the Nile River. Many of the tablets are incomplete or badly damaged, and of the 382 tablets discovered, the translations of about 350 are included in this book, with about 25 of these being too fragmentary for translation. Those which are excluded are not related to historical events and cover such topics as myths, epics, syllabaries, lexical texts, a god list, and 15 which are still to be deciphered.
Most of the letters included in the book were sent to the Pharaoh, with only a handful being from the Pharaoh. 44 are classified as International correspondence, with the rest being Vassal correspondence from rulers of various cities in the region. The contents of many of the letters from rulers of these vassal cities are subservient acknowledgements of orders received from the "Chief Executive", but a large number are complaints about other rulers and the depredations of the 'Apiru, which are either a justification as to why the orders have not been followed, or are an urgent request for help to deal with these marauders. Some of them are quite amusing, others are quite pitiful, and I found the laconic titles which Professor Moran has assigned to the letters to be very appropriate and often very amusing.
The translations are difficult reading because of the often uncertain reading of the contents of each tablets, The notes attached to each translation deal with difficulties in deciphering individual signs, in determining the meanings of words, in grammatical uncertainties, gaps in the texts, scribal style and errors, and discussion of some of the differing translations of sentences. There are occasional notes on the meanings of some expressions but this is rare. The notes, therefore, may be a helpful explanation to those scholars who are experts in the translation of ancient documents of the Near East, but unfortunately they were not very helpful to a non expert like myself. One thing I did get out of the notes, however, was a much improved vocabulary of words with a grammatical meaning! Incidentally, Volume I of Anthology of Texts and Pictures of the Ancient Near East (ISBN: 0691002002) does include the W F Albright translation of about 20 of these letters, which have a slightly different style but otherwise only a few differences from the translations in this book
What I found most helpful in understanding the text was an extensive index broken down by personal names, divine names, and geographical names, with each entry having a short description of who, what, where, and how. The map showing the location of those vassal states whose sites have been identified was also a useful aid in understanding the geographical context of the correspondence.
In summary, this book satisfied my curiosity on the contents of the Amarna letters, I learned a lot from reading it, and I have a much greater appreciation of the difficulties in obtaining an accurate translation and an appropriate interpretation of the texts. This will be a good reference book if I decide to investigate the subject further. If you are a student and have the same urge as myself to know more about the actual contents of these letters, then this book may be for you. If you are more interested in an interpretation of the content (which may or may not be the most correct one) you might do better by looking elsewhere. |
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