Early in the eighteenth century an Arab tribe known as the Beni Amran settled in a semicircular plain about one hundred ninety miles south of Cairo. Here, clustered along the east bank of the Nile, they built the villages of El Till, El Hag Quandil, El Amariah and Hawata. When the Danish traveler F. L. Norden visited the area in 1773 he noted that the natives called it Beni Amran, or Omarne. The name Tell el Amarna, by which it is popularly known today, seems to have been coined by John Gardner Wilkinson, the amateur Egyptologist who did so much to popularize Egyptian studies in Victorian Britain. Wilkinson combined the name of the village El Till (altered to the more common word tell, which means “mound” in Arabic) with the tribal name El Amarna, from the Beni Amran. The name Tell el Amarna is not strictly correct, for the ancient city of Akhetaton which occupied the site of Amarna does not have a succession of levels indicating different periods of occupation, such as archaeologists identify in the mounds of Palestine and Mesopotamia. Akhetaton was built to be the capital of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaton, about 1365 B.C., and was abandoned half a century later.

The Beginnings

Egyptian archaeology gained impetus in modern times following Napoleon’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign. The savants who accompanied the army of Napoleon studied Egyptian antiquities and discovered the trilingual inscription known as the Rosetta Stone which provided scholars with the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphic writing. That, in turn, enabled modern students to get a firsthand view of life in ancient Egypt, instead of depending on references to Egypt in classical literature for basic information.

A French scholar, Jean Francois Champollion, studied the Rosetta Stone in the light of his previous work in Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language which used a modified Greek alphabet. After four years of research, in 1822 Champollion published his conclusions which provided a firm foundation for the science of Egyptology which was soon added to the curricula of the major universities of Europe. Scholars, both professional and amateur, began making their way to Egypt to copy inscriptions and study antiquities.

The rock tombs beyond the Amarna plain did not escape these early travelers. During his explorations in Egypt from 1821 to 1831, John Gardner Wilkinson visited Amarna, and a more systematic study of the nearby tombs was made by a Prussian expedition directed by Karl Richard Lepsius from 1842 to 1845. Amarna art and inscriptions found a place in the twelve volume work of Lepsius, Denkmaler aus Aegypten und Athiopien (in English, The Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia). The Prussians traced the ground plan of Akhetaton, observing the lines of its ancient streets. They noted that some of the remains of the principal temple were still standing.

The Amarna Tablets

It was late in 1887, however, before Amarna yielded its most spectacular treasures, and even then it took some time before their value was recognized. When mud brick walls decompose, they form a nitrous soil which the Egyptians have learned to use as fertilizer. A peasant woman, digging for this fertilizer among the Amarna ruins, came upon a quantity of small baked clay tablets bearing cuneiform inscriptions. Some of the tablets were as small as two and one-eighth by one and eleven-sixteenths inches, while others were as large as eight and three-quarters by four and seven-eighth inches. Thousands of such tablets have been found among the ruins of ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cities, where cuneiform was the normal means of written communication from about 3000 BC, when history began, until the days of the Persian Empire (550-331 B.C.) when Aramaic, using an alphabet script, took its place. Cuneiform, however, seemed strangely out of place in Egypt. The woman who had accidently come upon the tablets, not knowing their value, is said to have disposed of her interest in the find for ten piasters—about fifty cents. The enterprising purchaser knew that Europeans were paying for antiquities from Egypt and he sought means of disposing of them at a good price.

An antiquities dealer showed wisdom in sending several of the texts to a noted Assyriologist, Jules Oppert of Paris, doubtless thinking that Oppert might encourage the Louvre to purchase them. Oppert had had extensive experience in archaeological work in the Near East. He had directed a French expedition at Babylon in 1852, and had subsequently been active in the work of deciphering cuneiform inscriptions. When Jules Oppert saw the Amarna tablets, however, he summarily dismissed them as forgeries. The story that they had been found in Egypt may have been too much for him to take. Tablets were also sent to the head of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, G. M. E. Grebaut, but he ventured no opinion concerning their worth. Perhaps he, too, was puzzled at the thought of cuneiform inscriptions in Egypt.

Since the authorities had shown no interest in the tablets, many of them were dumped into sacks and carried by donkey to Luxor with the hope that dealers there might be able to dispose of them through sale to tourists. In the process of transportation many of the tablets were literally ground to bits. Those that survived may be but a small fraction of the original archive.

Chauncey Murch, an American missionary stationed at Luxor, learned about the tablets and suspected they might be of real value. He, along with friendly antiquities dealers, brought them to the attention of E. A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, who happened to be in Egypt at the time for the purpose of adding to the museum collection. Budge was enthusiastic with what he saw, although he was by no means the only one who had come to realize that these little lumps of baked clay would be of inestimable value to the linguist and the historian of the ancient East. Although we have no way of knowing exactly how many of the tablets were irretrievably damaged or destroyed, about three hundred and fifty were preserved, and later discoveries increased the total number of Amarna tablets in the various collections to about four hundred.

Budge would have purchased the entire lot for the British Museum, but the tablets were in the hands of several dealers, some of whom had made agreements with an agent of the Berlin Museum for the sale of antiquities. As a result the British Museum and the Berlin Museum each acquired collections of Amarna Tablets, and smaller quantities went elsewhere. Budge acquired eighty-two for the British Museum and Theodore Graf of Vienna purchased about one hundred and eighty tablets which were sold to J. Simon of Berlin for presentation to the museum. The Berlin collection was subsequently increased to over two hundred. Sixty of the tablets remained in Cairo, twenty-two from a later discovery went to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and the remainder are scattered among other museums and private collections. The Louvre has six, two are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and one is in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

In 1892, Frederick J. Bliss, while excavating Tell el Hesi in southern Palestine discovered a cuneiform tablet which mentions a name known from the Amarna tablets. It evidently dates from the Amarna period. At Taanach, five miles southeast of Megiddo in northern Palestine, Ernst Sellin discovered four more letters in 1903. They date in the fifteenth century B.C., about three generations before the bulk of the Amarna tablets. As late as the winter of 1933-34, members of the Egyptian Exploration Society discovered eight additional tablets at the original site. Six of these were school texts and exercises used by students in the local academy where Egyptians were taught to read and write Akkadian.

Several of the Amarna tablets contain lists of signs and items of vocabulary. Others are practice copies of such Akkadian myths as Adapa and the South Wind, Ereshkigal and Nergal, and the King of Battle epic. Most, however, comprise the diplomatic correspondence of the Egyptian Foreign Office during the reigns of Amenhotep III and IV (Akhenaton). The archives included letters to and from Babylon (13 items), Assyria (2), Mitanni (13), Alashia (=Cyprus?) (8), the Hittites (at least 1). Two letters, written in a Hittite dialect, probably involve the king of Arzawa, a region along the southern coast of Asia Minor. One letter is written to the kings of Canaan demanding safe passage of a messenger who is on his way to Egypt. Another is a letter from a Babylonian princess to the Egyptian ruler. Most of the rest—actually about four-fifths of the whole collection—are letters to and from the rulers of city-states of Canaan (Kinahni), a name applying in general to Palestine, Syria, and Phoenicia; and the Amorites (Amurru) of Lebanon. This extensive correspondence enables us to reconstruct the political history of the Near East during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C., a period frequently called the Amarna Age. While neither the Egyptian Pharaohs nor the rulers of Canaanite city-states used Akkadian as their mother tongue, it served as the language of diplomacy among people with varied ethnic backgrounds.

Excavations at Amarna

With the recognition of the nature and value of the Amarna texts, attention naturally turned to the place where they were discovered. In 1891 W. Flinders Petrie, who had already spent a decade in Egypt, began excavating the Amarna ruins. He cleared many of the official buildings in the center of the city, and several houses farther south. Near the village of El Till he discovered the painted pavements of Akhenaton’s palace, and remains of the ornamental decorations of the palace itself. To the east of the palace was the chamber in which the Foreign Office records were kept. This was where the first Amarna Tablets were discovered in 1887, and here Petrie uncovered twenty-two additional fragments which comprise the collection now in the Ashmolean Museum.