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Eric H. Cline, "Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Eric H. Klein, professor of Classics and Anthropology at George Washington University. Eric is author of some of my favorite books, including 1177 B.C. the Year Civilization Collapsed and its sequel, After 1177 B.C. i'm thrilled to get the chance today to speak with him about his new book, Love, War and Diplomacy. The discovery of the Amarna letters and the Bronze Age world they revealed. All history rests on evidence, and often the further back we peer, the less evidence we have to construct our images of the past. The Amarna letters are a treasure trove of letters discovered in Egypt that have given scholars an incredible window into the Bronze Age. To help us understand these letters and their significance for historical understanding, I'm pleased today to have Eric on the Princeton University Press Ideas podcast. Eric, thanks for joining me.
- [00:54]
A
Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
- [00:57]
B
I was really excited when I saw this book coming out because I've just really enjoyed your past books and I just recommend anyone who is unfamiliar with them to go and check them out because I just learning about the year 1177 B.C. it's just incredible. It is this year that sticks out of my mind when I think about history as just a incredibly fascinating period. And I think this book, you know, dealing with the Bronze Age is just, you know, yet another entry into this incredible, you know, little, little series that you've been constructing over the years. But before even talking about the book, you know, I was wondering if you just tell us a little about yourself and some of your past work and just, you know, your career interests, how you've, how you've gone down this road of potentially becoming like the Bronze Age guy.
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A
Yes, well, which was totally unintentional and yet intentional. Right now, as you said, I'm a professor at George Washington University. My specialty is the Bronze Age. I'm both an archaeologist and an ancient historian. I've got degrees in both. Basically, I started out working over in Greece doing the Mycenaeans and Minoans, and then I jumped over to the near east because I was always interested in the international connections in the ancient world, particularly in the Bronze Age. And that actually goes back. My interest in the Bronze Age goes back to when I was 7 years old and my mother gave me a book on Troy and Heinrich Schliemann and I announced I was going to be an archaeologist. And lo and behold, not only am I an archaeologist, but I'm specializing in that period of the Trojan War and all of that. But I've published on a number of things. I've excavated a lot. I was at Megiddo for 20 years. Now I'm digging at Telcabri with Osofia Sorlandau. It's a Canaanite palace, 4,000 years old. But along the way, I decided I wanted to write things that were accessible to the general public as well as to my colleagues. And so I dipped my toe in the water and found out that I enjoyed it. And so bit by bit by bit, I've been doing that. And so that's where, for instance, 1177 B.C. came from, because I wanted to, you know, the general public to know about the late Bronze Age and then about what happened when it collapsed, especially since I think there's some lessons for us today. And then Rob Tempio at Princeton said, well, now we need a sequel. What happened afterward? So that's where after 1177 BC came from. But then I also wanted to do kind of a deep dive into one aspect of that period, and that's where this new book comes in. I've always been fascinated with the Amarna Age, which is Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh who might have started monotheism. And he and his father, Amenhotep III, left this archive which only covers 30 years. So this new book is a deep dive into just three decades. And I thought this is a good way to get deeper into the period that I love and that I've introduced people to. So let's see where we can go with that. So that's where this comes from.
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B
I love that this is a dive into these texts that you're essentially just. You're working with a corpus. It's a large corpus and obviously a complicated corpus, as you explain that you're building off of the work of so many other people here. I also love that your story about being seven years old and, and first getting exposure there. I don't know what it is about ancient history or, you know, I guess this is ancient history because we have information about it. It's not, not quite prehistory, though. It's, it's on the, on the, the bleeding edge. There's something about, about it, you know, I don't know, a childhood child. You know, children, I think, are just naturally fascinated by, by the deep past. So I think that's, that's just, that's wonderful that you were able to essentially make good on that dream that so many kids fail to. To make good on.
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A
Right. Yeah. The Amarna Letters, it's either that or dinosaurs, right?
- [05:19]
B
Yes, yeah, yeah, as you either go, which is, you know, I guess, relatively speaking, it's basically the present. The Amarna letters, as you describe them in the book, are just so fascinating and it's just incredible to think of these, these tablets lying dormant for so long and then being discovered. And even the story of how they were discovered too being, you know, not, not really knowing exactly who discovered them. And I was wondering if you could just tell that story that you introduced at the beginning of the book about how the letters were actually discovered.
- [05:50]
A
Yeah, so they were discovered sometime during the year 1887. So it's about 140, 150 years ago, give or take. And the usual story told is that there was a local woman who was in the ruins of the city looking for fertilizer, is how the story goes. Now the ruins that she was in are the ruins of the city Akhetaten, which was the capital city that Akhenaten built when he became pharaoh of Egypt. And he's ruling around about 1350 BCE. You know, somewhere in there, his father was Amenhotep III. And the book swirls around both of them. But most people, they haven't heard of Amenhotep iii, but they've heard of Akhenaten since he, the so called heretic pharaoh who might have started monotheism. I don't think it's quite monotheism, but he did outlaw worship of all the other gods and goddesses in Egypt, except for Aten, the disk of the sun. And along with his revolutions in religion and art and other things, he also built a new capital city which is basically halfway between Cairo and Luxor in modern day terms. And he called it Akhetate. It was only inhabited during his reign and the minute he died it was abandoned and the court moved back down to Luxor. And it was actually moved by the man who was probably his son, namely King Tut. So you know, you know Akhenaten, you know King Tut. And now you know that the capital city was only inhabited for maybe, you know, a decade, two decades, you know, something like that. So this woman looking for fertilizer in the ruins is kind of a believable story because the ruins, the soil that she was gathering would have been good for fertilizer back home. But I don't actually think that's what happened. I think it's a made up story because the woman herself could never be located afterward. And indeed I think that. And again, I'm resting on the shoulders here of previous scholarship who have suggested this, that it was actually an illegal excavation by an antiquities dealer who, to cover up his activities, he made up the story about the woman and just said, yeah, this woman found it, she sold it to somebody who sold it to somebody who sold it to me. So there's like, you know, three degrees of separation. Like me. No, I wasn't illegally excavating. No, no, no, it was this woman and she wasn't illegally. Anyway, she was just looking for fertilizer, you know. Anyway, we get stories like that somebody searching for a lost goat happens to find a tomb when they were actually going out to the tomb rob, you know. Anyway, so the story that's been handed down to us is of this woman accidentally finding them. There's about 400 clay tablets in all that comprise what we now call the Amarna archives. So Akhetaten, the ancient city, is now known today as Tell El Amarna. And hence we call these tablets the Amarna letters. They're not actually all letters. There's about 400 in all. 50 of them are royal letters between the pharaohs and the other great kings of the day, the king of the Hittites and king of Assyria, king of Babylonia and so on. Another 300 are letters from what I would call petty Canaanite kings, the vassal kings that owed allegiance to the Egyptian pharaohs. And they're the ones that are in what is today modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Palestinian territories. So there's about 300 of those and then there's another 50 that are. Oh, boy, school texts. Kids learning how to write things like that. Because it looks like there was a school located there as well. So about 400 tablets, 50 royal letters, 300 petty Canaanite kings letters, those are the ones that we are interested in. And once they were discovered, they made their way down to Luxor and elsewhere and were eventually sold to a number of different antiquities dealers. And I go through some of their stories in the book and then from there they went to a number of different museums in different countries. So now if you want to go see these Amarna letters, you have to visit 14 different museums in eight different countries and 10 different cities on four continents. I mean, it is the absolute worst case scenario for splitting up an archive, you know, when these should all have been kept together and they should actually all have been excavated by archeologists. Because we're also told by various people that as they were being taken down to Luxor and being sold, that a number of them were accidentally Destroyed, like they were in the saddlebags on donkeys and knocking against each other and were breaking or they were dropped or what. And one of the seriologists who tried to decipher them estimated that we might have lost a third of them. So, you know, if that's the case, there might have been, I don't know, what, 600 original, and we've got 400, so it's such a shame. And we're not actually 100% sure where they were found at the site. We think we know the building, but subsequent archaeologists that went and excavated only found, you know, scraps basically, but nothing else. And so it's been suggested by some of the previous scholars that the part of the archive that was still alive, if you will, where there were still correspondence going back and forth, that that was taken back down to Luxor and the only things that were left at Amarna were the closed cases, if you will, and they're like, yeah, we don't need those. Those are done. The other kings are dead. Let's leave them here. So we probably only have a part of it to begin with, but really, these should all be together. Ideally, they'd all be reunited in one place, but the most are in Berlin. Then the British Museum and then the museum in Cairo. Those are the three big collections. And then we've got various smaller numbers scattered among all the other museums. But it really is a shame that they're not all united now.
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B
I know Egypt just. I don't know if it's officially opened yet, created a new museum, so maybe there'll be a reason to reunite them. I know they're doing the King Tut exhibit again, a classic.
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A
Yes, that would be. That would be nice. And yeah, I believe that the gem, the Grand Egyptian Museum, as you say, at least part of it. I think they had their grand opening just a day or two ago.
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B
Yeah, it looks incredible. I definitely would love to visit it. And I'm wondering for you then, as you were approaching this project, what was your research like? What was it like going through the work that had been done on this? And then let's also get into just, you know, when these letters were first discovered, what it was like for the various scholars trying to translate it. Like, I've read about, you know, this sort of period, late 19th century period, and just the scholarly competition, fury around trying to translate documents from the past. What was it actually actually like for. For these scholars going through and trying to make sense of these tablets?
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A
Well, I have to say that I have the Utmost sympathy for them, in part because when I was in graduate school, I actually, well, Acadian is one of the languages that I was taught, or rather Acadian in cuneiform, let's put it that way. So cuneiform is the writing system. It looks like a bird stepped on ink and walked across the page and that's what they're using to write on these clay tablets. But they're writing in Akkadian, which is, you know, normally the language over in Mesopotamia, right? Assyria, Babylonia. But it also at the time was the lingua franca for diplomacy, much like French was the international language of diplomacy in Benjamin Franklin's day. Same type of idea. So if you were a Hittite in ancient Anatolia, right, modern day Turkey, and you were a scribe writing, you would know Hittite and you would know Akkadian. If you're down in Egypt and you're a scribe, you would know Egyptian and you would know Akkadian. If you're in Mesopotamia, you're lucky because you're just, you know, knowing Akkadian. So when I was in graduate school, one of my courses, it was actually a one on one, just me and the professor and we were reading the Amarna letters and you know, he would say, okay, for next week go trans 82, 83, 84 and 85. And then I would come back the next week and for three hours it would just be the two of us going through analyzing the signs, seeing if we agreed with the transliteration, you know, the sounds and then the translation. And that's exactly what the scholars back in 1887, 1888, 1889 were doing as well, except for for them it was all really brand new. So there have been, for instance, books written on the race to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Right. There has been a fairly recent book on the race to actually translate Akkadian, but there hadn't been anything written on the race to specifically translate this archive. And yet I already had an inkling that it was absolutely fascinating, this race because it involved like seven different people. And so I thought that that would make a really interesting story, which really hadn't been told before for the general public. But also one thing that I had to keep in mind is that the race to translate cuneiform, to know what these signs meant and therefore to translate Akkadian had only happened in about 1850 or so. And these were found in 1887. So it hasn't even been 40 years that they figured out how to read what's on the Tablets. And now they had the tablets. But that race in itself in 1850 was really interesting because they gave a newly discovered tablet found elsewhere to three or four different scholars and says, okay, what's it say? And when they all independently came back with about the same translation, they said, okay, yeah, okay, we can read it now. So these scholars that start working on the Amarna letters, they start right away. I mean, we've got the Amarna letters for sure by the fall of 1887, by November December, the news is full. I mean, word has spread to the British Museum and elsewhere. And so the antiquities dealers and some of the scholars start flocking to Egypt. And so we get, for instance, the Egyptologist Wallace Budge coming over from the British Museum. We get the assyriologist, ah, Sayce coming over from Oxford, and those were the two British scholars that were working on them. And they start, like, publishing right away. Some of them, like Sayce, had a regular column in a newspaper that he would send letters to and started publishing that way. But his initial efforts were just. And I document this in the book. His initial efforts were so off that I would say it's not even funny. Except it's funny. I mean, he thought he wanted. He was looking for the Bible everywhere. And he thought David was in these. King David. He thought King Solomon was in these. Spoiler alert. Neither of them are in here because these letters date from the 14th century BC and David and Solomon are down in the 10th century, like 400 years later. But he tried Wallace Bud, the Egyptologist, who was kind of the man everyone loved to hate. They knew he was brilliant, but they really didn't like him. Somebody at one point in one of the obituaries said you had to acknowledge his genius. But of all the Egyptologists, he was probably the most despised by his colleagues. But on the other hand, his translations were pretty good. And he, in his autobiography, tells us all about how he bought 81 of the letters in Luxor from an antiquities dealer and then brazenly smuggled them out of Egypt and sent them back to the British Museum and just said, you know, no apology. If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So. And in fact, the trustees of the museum, far from condemning him, said, nice job. And you can see in their minutes that they, you know, they. They praise him.
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B
Do you know roughly how heavy that, you know, that set would have been? Like, I'm kind of curious, like, about the physical, you know, tactile experience of actually holding one.
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A
Yeah, it wouldn't have been that heavy. I mean, most of these tablets can fit into your, the palm of your hand. All right, they're not huge, some of them, a couple of them can get up to like a foot, a foot and a half tall. But those are rare. So if you put like all 80, 81 into one box, it. You wouldn't need two people to carry it. But you could have done that. I mean, it's not going to be incredibly heavy. And it's not like these are made of stone, they're made of clay, you know. But anyway, so Budge and says are the two Brits that are working on these. But then the Germans that come in are absolutely fascinating. They got like the lion's share of the tablets. They got about 160 that were sent to Berlin right away. And then they acquired more as well. So by the end they've probably got half of the letters in Berlin. And some of the names are household names to archaeologists. Others are only known to, like, Assyriologists, the people that study and translate Akkadian. So for instance, this one guy, Hugo Winkler, he's a name I had known all through graduate school because he began in 1906 excavating at Hattusas, the capital city of the Hittites in Anatolia, and promptly found one or more of their archives of clay tablets written in Hittite, but also using cuneiform, but using it to write Hittite, it's like, you know, today we use the Latin Alphabet to write English and French and German and Italian and Spanish. You can use cuneiform to write Akkadian and Sumerian and Hittite and all that. So I had known Winkler as the guy who found the capital city of the Hittites and their archives. And by 10 years later, in 1916, Hittite had been translated. Winkler was dead by then, died very young. But so what I did not realize, and this is where writing this book held surprises for me, which I found, I loved it. I'm like, wow, you know, there's still stuff to learn. Winkler was one of the main guys on the German side to translate the Amarna letters. And in fact, his translations were among the best. And he's the one that finally published the entire corpus, or almost all, not the whole thing, but a lot of it simultaneously in English and in German. And that happened in 1896. So it wasn't even a decade after they were first found that Winkler came out. And those, they stood the test of time for a good 20 years or so before then somebody redid them. But the other names are like I say are only really known to either assyriologist or Egyptologists. Adolf Ehrmann, Carl Lehmann, Carl Benzold, Heinrich Zimmer. But as a whole, I call them in the book the Young Berliners, because they were all young, relatively speaking, especially for academics. They were in their 20s and 30s for the most part, and they were all in Berlin. And so I'm like, I gotta call them as a group something. So the Young Berliners came right to mind, though I kept thinking of ich bin ein Berliner and the famous I'm a jelly donut with JFK when he was there. So I tried not to think of jelly Donuts minutes too much when I was writing the book. But anyway, so we've got basically two Brits and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or so Germans working on this all at the same time. And they were sometimes collegial and they were sometimes competitive. And so what I do in basically half the book is walk through their mistakes and their successes and show you how they worked off of each other and walk us through from 1887 up through about 1915 when they were pretty much all translated. So that's about half the book. But I don't make it all one solid half. We jump around a bit to break things up. So I kind of had fun after I wrote the book then, mixing and matching the chapters so I could keep the pace moving. So I mixed it up then with. So, okay, so they translated it. What do they actually say in the tablets? What do we learn? And so that's like the other half of the book, but again, I mix and match it. So you're not just. Just doing that, but you. You visit it and then come back, and then you go. And then you come back. So I had a lot of fun because for me, I was interested in both. And again, I learned a lot that I didn't know, which surprised me because, you know, not only had I studied them in graduate school, but I've been teaching about them now for 20 or 30 years. But this is the beauty of ancient history and archeology. There's always more to learn. Even if you think you've mastered a topic, there's. There's still, you know, nice tidbits and sometimes huge areas that you're like, wow, I didn't know that. Okay, that fleshes it out. So I always learned so much when I'm writing a book. Even if I think I know enough to begin with to write it, by the end, I'm like, well, okay, I just learned a lot that's good. And I hope I'm able to get it across to the general public. Not only all the data, but kind of my passion for it. And here I think this is interesting, and I hope you will think it too. And here's why I think you should think it's interesting. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully there'll be people out there that find it as interesting as I do, but we shall see.
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B
Translating from Acadian to English sounds incredibly difficult to me. And I'm wondering, you know, if you could explain some of the techniques of translation that were being used by the scholars and how. How that process was for them, you know, differed. You know, obviously when you're translating it, you get to build off of the fact that a lot of work has already been done.
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A
But.
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B
But what were some of the techniques of translation that they. That they. And was there anything interesting that you learned about how we might think about, you know, other texts today that still are yet to be translated, what we can learn from the people that were, you know, really doing it by hand in the past?
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A
Yeah, well, I mean, what really comes to mind is the trial and error. And in particular, says got so many things wrong, but it wasn't for lack of trying. It was because he had tried to decipher so many different languages that were brand new for his generation. So, you know, Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, all of these were. Were being deciphered and translated at that time. And one of the things, first of all to realize is that in. In doing this and doing the cuneiform with Akkadian, it's not an Alphabet, it's syllabic. So you have like a vowel and a consonant as a sign. It's a pictographic sign, but it's not a picture. It's, you know, you take a reed and you smash it into the clay a couple of different times and you form a sign. And if you're a scribe, you've memorized them. There's like. I've even forgotten now. There's like 600 different signs that you can make using cuneiform, but some of them have multiple meanings depending on the context. So it can be this consonant and vowel in this situation, but it can be this vowel and consonant over here and so on and so forth. So you have to figure it out. And sometimes it's trial and error, sometimes it's context. So let me just give you an example. Like, Hammurabi's law code is written this way. So you have a sign for Shum S H U m. And then you have a sign for ma, and so you we, you know, squish them together. And the word is shuma, meaning if, but you write it shum and ma. So if, and then shuma. The whole first law code is shuma, awilam, awilam, if one man to another man. And so, and it's A. And then you have the same first two signs, A and we. But then you have the sign for lam. So it's a wilam and a wilam, if one man to another man, right? So it's all, you know, we do this in English too, right? Which is the object of the sentence, which is the subject of the sentence. Anyway, so you would do it like that. And the, my favorite part is at the very end, the very last word is just, he shall die. And the actual law is if one man has accused another man of murder but has failed to prove it, he shall die. Right? In other words, the penalty he asked for, he gets it. So now that is Hammurabi's law code, which is back in 1800 BC, 400 years or so before the amara letters. But the idea is the same. So when I was learning Akkadian, I had to memorize the signs. But you know, frankly there's too many signs to memorize. So I would sit there with a sign list and try and, you know, and match it and go, ah. But after a while and there's repetition. So you know, Hammurabi's law code, most of them are like, if, then, if this happens, then this happens. So you get to know the signs for shum and ma really quickly. Okay, that's shuma, that's if. Same thing with the Amarna letters. They have a standard formula for the most part as the opening paragraph, to so and so. And they put in the name of the king, thus says so and so, and that's the king who's sending it. And then, and the reason it says, you know, two and thus says is because the king is dictating to his scribe. So the scribe is not to so and so. They're like, okay, this is what this guy is saying. But then he says things like, may you be well, may your wives be well, may your horses be well, may your chariots be well. And then I am well, my wives are well, my chariots are well, my horses are well. And if you have a lesser king, like one of these petty Canaanite kings, he will also say something like, you know, to the king, my lord, my son, I throw myself at Your feet seven times and seven times over and again. It gets very repetitious. But that means that we can recognize it. We're like, oh, yeah, yeah. You know, I haven't seen this king's name before, but I've seen everything else, so I know what he's saying. And then you come back and try to figure out, you know, what the king's name is. They don't actually get to the body of what they're asking for or telling him until the second or third paragraph. You know, it's like having a conversation today. You want something from somebody, you ask him out to lunch or dinner. You don't sit down and immediately say, okay, here's what we're meeting. You know, unless you're pressed for time. You sit or even on a phone call and you're like, how you doing? How's it going? How's the family? You know, what are you up to these days? And then after, like, five minutes of personal communication, or after you've eaten the main meal and you're on dessert and coffee, you say, okay, so the reason I wanted to meet with you is. Well, they do that in the Amarna letters also. They take up, like the whole front of the tablet with these, you know, hello, how you doing? And then on the back of the tablet, they're like, okay, so here's why I'm writing, right? So and so has attacked me. I need some help. Can you send me a dozen archers? And upon occasion, by that point, they've already run out of room. So they're writing up the side of the tablet, you know, like. Like when we run out of room, writing a letter and you have to sign it going up the side again. So anyway, once they figure that out back then, once they figured out that there was kind of a ritual to the way these letters were written, then they were able to get much better about what they said. But bear in mind that, as I said, that some of the signs can have alternate readings. So, for instance, there are two letters from as correspondence between the Egyptian pharaoh and the king of Artsawa, or Zawa, as some say. It's on the western coast of Anatolia. It's kind of near Troy, but to the south of it. And in the first iterations of the translations, they had a different name for it. They were like calling it Asapu or Azapu, something like that. But it turns out it's the exact same signs. But now we read them. Arzawa, so Artsawa. So they weren't wrong. It's just they were reading the alternate transliterations, the sounds for them. So I was coming down pretty hard on them in the book, in one of the drafts, just saying, can't believe they got it so wrong and this and that. And then I sent a copy to a friend and said, you know, what do you think? And they're like, you're being awfully hard on these guys. I mean, they were just starting out, and you remember when you were learning? And I'm like, yeah, I do. And then I thought, let me put myself in their shoes. I'm like, oh, wow, they did so much better than I would have done. And so I backed off a bit and cut them some slack. But it is still interesting when you compare, like, Winkler's translations to Seis's translations, and Winkler's are so much better that I actually say in the book at one point, I really wonder when Sayce published his columns and was so wrong saying it was, you know, that Solomon was in there or that even they were from the time of Nebuchadnezzar, which is, you know, down in the 6th century, which is what he first said. I'm like, I wonder what Winkler and the other Germans thought of Sayce. Were they snickering at him? Or were they like, oh, my God, there he goes again. And we actually do have one instance where a fellow, it was either an American or a British scholar, said, yeah, Face is a genius, but he was like a butterfly flitting in a garden, never staying long enough in any one place. And actually said, we have had reason to regret some of the things he has said recently. He hastened to conclusions but was unable to prove them. So, anyway, it was, for me, really interesting to see these are the early days of translating not just the Amarna letters, but anything in Akkadian. And so watching how they did it is really interesting. And especially, and this will be my last point for right now, they finally realized that there were two letters in the archives that were not written in Akkadian. One was written in Hittite and one was written in Hurrian, which is the language of Mitanni. Mitanni is over in basically Syria today. And so, you know, watching them try to translate them to begin with, when they thought they were in Akkadian, and then watching what they do when they're like, whoa, oh, oh, this one's in Hittite, okay? And realizing they can't read it because Winkler hadn't even discovered the capital city until 1906, which is, you know, 20 years later. And Hittite was not actually translated, as they said, till 1916, which was another 10 years. So they're making these efforts that, yeah, we've got, you know, 398 tablets in Akkadian and then one in Hittite and one in Hurrian, except then it turned out there was a second one in Hittite. And anyway, so I now, I would say, having written the book, I am utterly sympathetic for their efforts and much more admiring than I had been. And I'm just like, okay, these guys were good. They all were. Even in making mistakes, got to cut them slack, you know, put yourself back in their shoes back then. And it turns out to be a really interesting time, especially considering the time in which they were working, the late 1880s and everything Europe was going through at that time. And in fact, I wonder in the book if they noticed any parallels between the little friction between the small Canaanite city states that they were studying and their own things, the little kingdoms and city states in Europe while they were working. And did they realize the parallels? I'm sure they did, but that added another dimension. Right.
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B
Yeah. I also wonder too, like in the context of the scramble for Africa and just the various global geopolitical tensions that were leading European powers to the Middle east, to Africa. Yeah. And not only that, but also just in the context too, I think, as I think are demonstrating with seis, just this sense too, that digging into the past, understanding the past, will give insight into Christianity or religion in a way that felt extremely important for us, maybe more interested in the historical components of it. But for them, it was like, this will reveal something about when the return of Christ might happen. I don't know if these scholars are necessarily thinking in those terms. Maybe Sayce was. But obviously that was part of the motivation too, for just the fascination with the past as well.
- [40:24]
A
Yes. And the other thing that I realized rather belatedly is that this is the same time period that people like Austin Henry Layard are digging up the cities in Mesopotamia and finding the Neo Assyrian kings and the Neo Babylonian kings who are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament. And that, I think, is actually why Sais wanted to find David and Solomon in the Amarna letters, because it would be kind of a rivalry to what Layard was excavating in Mesopotamia. So I think that was a part of it as well.
- [41:07]
B
So, you know, we've talked a little bit about the, you know, the. The breakdown of what was in the various letters, what types of letters they were. But, you know, having. Having actually gone through Them, read them, you know, what picture does it paint of the late Bronze Age period? And also just for you, you know, did it confirm what you felt like? You, you already know, obviously you, it's something you've been studying for your career. But doing this, you know, what, what's the sort of the picture that was painting for you of this, this very narrow period of time covered in the letters.
- [41:37]
A
So it did bring it to life. But I already knew, like I said, I already knew what was in them for the most part. But even when I was writing the book then and, and doing literally a deep dive into the contents, I was not aware of the complexities of some of the minor conflicts, I think you could say. But we need to break them down into the two groups that I mentioned at the top of the show. So we've got about 50 royal letters, and these are both letters to and from Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, his son. And they are writing to people like Suppiluliuma. He's my favorite king because I like saying his name. Suppiluliuma I of the Hittites up in ancient Anatolia, but also Ashu Uballit in Assyria, Kadashman Enlil and various other people. We've got the king of Babylon, king of Assyria, king in Cyprus, and, you know, and the king of Artsua or Arzawa in western Anatolia. And those letters from the great kings really are what paint the picture of this being a golden age, right? This 14th century B.C. the other kings are writing to the Egyptian pharaohs, basically asking for gold and offering their daughters in return. In fact, one letter, the foreign king says, gold is like dust in your land. You don't really need it. Just send me some, send me some nuggets of gold and in return I'll send you my daughter. And the Egyptian king writes back, what kind of a man are you that would give your daughter for a few nuggets of gold? But okay, and the exchange is made, daughter is sent, nuggets of gold are sent back. And we see this again and again. But basically what we've got are a series of dynastic marriages that are recorded in these royal letters because each time one of the other kings comes to the throne, he has to basically re establish relations with the Egyptian pharaoh. And that frequently entails sending a daughter to the Egyptian harem. And so in a couple of letters they actually give us the genealogy, which is fabulous. That's where we get our history. The king would say, my grandfather, so and so you know, Sutarna sent his daughter to your grandfather, and then my father sent his daughter to your father. Now I am sending my daughter to you. And so there were, like, three princesses from Babylonia in the harem. And upon occasion, the foreign king would say, you know, actually, wait a minute, before I send you my daughter, is my aunt still there? Because I know my dad sent his sister or his daughter, you know, and is she still alive? Does anybody know what she looks like? And so we get these back and forth, but we also have a number of the tablets filled with line after line after line after line of the gifts that are being sent and the dowries that are coming with these royal princesses. You know, one tablet is just. I mean, it's actually more than one tablet. One letter has got, like, two or three tablets to it. And we know we're missing quite a few of them because they, like, start in the middle of the letter and then end. It doesn't even end, it just, you know, breaks off. So we're like, ah, this is probably tablet two out of three tablets. We're missing the first and we're missing the last. So that's where it gets problematic, too. We cannot say, you know, definitively, oh, so and so is not in contact with so and so what's going on? No, because they might have lost that letter. And in fact, for me, that was one of the problems that I raised towards the end of the book. There's no letter from a Mycenaean or a Minoan ruler from Crete or mainland Greece, but there should be, at least in my opinion. But I don't think we can read anything into it, because, for example, we only have one letter from the king of Assyria, and we know that he was a big deal, so we must be missing a bunch from him. And I just think we're missing the ones from the Aegean. So you can talk about what's there, you can't talk about what's not there. Right. And that's where. What we always say in archaeology, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence just because we don't have it. That might have been one of the tablets that shattered in the saddlebag. We also know that there is a tablet that fell out of the jacket of an antiquities dealer when he was stepping into the train, and it fell out of his big pocket and shattered on the station platform. So maybe that was the letter from the king of Mycenae. Anyway, so these royal letters are about royal goods and royal marriages and nuggets. Of gold. But they also show us that they inherently did not trust the Egyptian pharaoh because when the pharaoh would send something made of gold, like a statue, they promptly put it into the kiln and melted it down to see if it was really gold. And half the time it wasn't. And they wrote to complain. They're like, what you sent me wasn't gold. It either looked like silver or like ashes. But they also excused the pharaoh. They said, you need to look at the shipment yourself before you send it, because I think your deputy swapped out the gold and root when you know, it was probably the pharaoh who was doing it to begin with. But anyway, so that's what the royal stuff is all about. And they're also. They are trading. They're doing commercial transactions. But kings can't do that. That's beneath kings. So what they're doing is what we would call gift exchange. So here I'm sending you two chariots of horses and five pairs of purple textiles or whatever. Now, in return, yeah, I need that gold, but I also need some of that oil that do. And I could use some perfume. And so they're exchanging gifts like, like we do at birthdays and Christmas and Hanukkah and Quanza and whatever else. But they're not trading. No, no, no, they're not trading. They're gift giving. Right? And they will accuse people of saying, I gave you this and you didn't come back with gifts of the same amount. So you need. You need to make it good it. Right? Okay, so those are the royal ones. Those are the 50, the 300 or so from the lesser kings, the vassal kings in Canaan, they're completely different. They give us a glimpse into the diplomacy at a much lower level. And these kings were busy fighting each other. At one point, I say they really sound like children squabbling and reporting to the pharaoh as if it's daddy or mommy, you know, so and so kicked me. So and so hit me. So and so is attacking my city. Help. Tell them to stop. Send me reinforcements. But these are like the king of Jerusalem, Abdi Heba, the king of Megiddo, Biridiya. We've got the king of Byblos, we've got the king of Beirut, We've got the king of Tyre, we've got the king of Akko. You know, these are names that still resonate today, right? We've got letters from the. The ruler of Gaza, you know, so it's everything that's still in the political picture today. They were already fighting and squabbling 3,400 years ago. And so one of the points that I make is, as I've done before in other books is things don't change much in that area of the world. People have been fighting for 3,400 years, 4,000 years. The weapons change, the actual people change, the reasons for fighting change. The one constant is there's fighting. And we see this in the Amarna letters. And as a result, we can write the history. We know the rulers. We've got at least two generations, if not three generations in some cases. We know the father and the son for sure, who ruled, like in Ako. And sometimes we can get down to the grandson also. But we can also see their interaction with the other rulers and try and construct the history of the period. The problem is, of course, none of these letters have a date on them and none of them say things like, this is letter number three of 26 that I'm sending you. So we have to figure out the order that the letters go in. And so a couple of times in the book, I say, as a caveat, the following is the way I've put the letters regarding this particular situation together. I hope I'm right, but it's possible they should be in a different order. But we see fighting like between Viridia and a guy named. He's in Megiddo and a guy named Labayu who's in Shechem. And Labayu is just causing problems for everybody. And so Biridia of Megiddo writes to the Egyptian pharaoh and says, labayu is attacking me. We can't even go out and harvest our fields. Send me 10 archers to protect my city. I am nothing if I'm not the servant of the Pharaoh. And seven times, and seven times over, I fall at his feet. And sometimes the Pharaoh would say, okay, here's a dozen archers. And other times he just wouldn't reply. So like I say, we've got about 300 of these, and some people wrote more than others. Rabbada of Byblos, for example, he writes 60 letters. And I can only imagine the. The Egyptian Pharaoh going, another one. Wait, what? And. And the scribe coming in and saying, you know, the mail is here for today, and you've got one letter from Abdi Heba of Jerusalem and another guy from the ruler of Tyre, and then we've got seven from that ruler of Biblos and is what again? Oh, my word. You know, but that's how we can keep track of what's happening at this time. But Definitely, life for the great kings and the royal letters is very different from life of the petty kings. And we very rarely get a glimpse of anybody lower than that. So we really are still looking at the 1%, you know, in terms of the great kings and maybe, you know, the 2% in terms of the petty kings. But we're really not getting a look at life for the regular person. Right. This is not telling us how the average person in Biblos or in Jerusalem lived at the time. We're just getting a glimpse at the upper levels. So you do have to keep that in mind. But it is a fascinating look at the diplomacy of the time, the warfare of the time, and the interactions, you know, commercial, diplomatic, you name it. And again, one of the things that I kept thinking throughout the whole thing of writing and researching and all that is just how much hasn't changed that we're still doing the exact same stuff in the same areas today.
- [54:31]
B
To what extent did social network analysis help you interpret the tablets? And I was also wondering if you just explain a little bit about how social network analysis is a tool that researchers can use to try and make sense of the various connections between people, especially when working with, you know, a text or a corpus that is limited in scope.
- [54:53]
A
Yeah, excellent question. So this social network analysis, or SNA as they call it, this was something that my late wife, Diane Harris Klein, became an expert on, and she applied SNA to the ancient world. So she had started out applying it, for example, to Alexander the Great. And her first article was actually called Six Degrees of Alexander. So it's kind of like the Kevin Bacon were the game that we play today. You know, what movies have Kevin Bacon been in and who has he been in them with? And can you get from that movie star to another one to another one? Right. So basically, social network analysis, you have pairs of people, so and so knows so and so, and then another pair, so and so knows so and so. And sometimes the people in the pairs will match. That's almost like a Venn diagram. So, you know, I know you, you know somebody else, and therefore, even if I don't know that other person because of you, I'm just two hops from them. So I'm not directly connected, but I'm interconnected. And sometimes I will also know them directly. So I know them through you, but I also know them anyway. So you can get relationships that way. So social network analysis maps the relationships between people. It's a series of pairs, and you can use a couple of different software programs to Generate the diagrams. They're called sociograms. In our case, Diane used a program called NodeXL, which I really like. It produces beautiful sociograms and it's fairly easy to use. You basically plug it into an Excel spreadsheet and then generate it from there. So what we did, I asked Diane after she had used it with Alexander the Great and Socrates. I showed her what I was working on when I was writing 1177 BC back in 2012, 2013, because that book first came out in 2014. And I said, could we apply social network analysis to some of the things from the late Bronze Age, such as the Amarna archive or some of the archives at Ugarit? And she said, absolutely. And so the two of us got together and first presented a paper in Prague back in 2014, and then published it as an article in 2015 on the social network of the Amarna letters. And in it we plugged into them like the royal letters. Okay, we've got Berna Boreas writing to Amenhotep iii. That's one pair. We've got so and so sending his daughter to the pharaoh. Well, that's a pair between the great king of the pharaoh and the daughter and the pharaoh, and so on. And we came up with a couple of wonderful sociograms in which we were able to map the relationships. So when it came time to write this book, I knew, you know, that 10 years earlier we had worked on this. And while I was working on the book, I asked Diane, because she was still with me at that time, I said, is it okay if we reuse the article from back then? And I put it in as the final chapters in the book. And she said, well, sure, but you have to ask the editors of the conference volume, which I did, and they're like, yeah, absolutely. Now what I said is I want to update the article and make it a bit more accessible for the general public. And so it, in fact, the reworked article is the last two chapters of this book. And what I'm, I'm asking is, what can we tell? Who are the major players? Who are the most important people and who are the people who are the most important connector in the network? Right? Like, if you took one person out of the network, would everything fall apart? And the answer is yes, some of the diplomats and some of the merchants are the go between people, and you remove them from the network and everything collapses. And so that's actually why social network analysis is still useful today in figuring out networks and either how to create them or how to break, break them. So what we did back then is figure out, you know, okay, so who's important and what was going on back then. And some of the things we found, some of the people that were mentioned the most frequently were because of the problems they were creating, they were the bad boys of the network. But as a result, everybody was talking about them. And not in a good way, but it did show how important they were at that time. One of the experiments that we did involved the Egyptian pharaoh because some of the letters say to Amenhotep iii, they actually knew his name in Akkadian, and others say to Akhenaten. And again, they knew his name in Akkadian, but the vast majority say to the king of Egypt. That's all they say say to the king of Egypt. And my guess is that the other kings, whether royal or petty, were not actually sure who was the king at that time. To whom were they writing? Was it still Amenhotep iii? Was it, you know, Akhenaten by this point? And I would say it's similar today when, when we're sending a letter and we're not quite sure who's going to read it it, but we want to make sure it kind of gets to the right person. We frequently say to whom it may concern. Right. And that's safe. Okay, to whom it may concern, Fine. You know, whereas if you say dear sir, dear madame, or dear sir or madame, you can sometimes get in trouble. But to whom it may concern works. So they frequently said say to the Egyptian pharaoh, which of course was perfectly valid, but we were asking which one is it? So into the NodeXL, into the software program, we did an experiment where the original pairing list had actually just said from the king of Babylon to the king of Egypt. And we changed it. We did a global change. What if the king of Egypt is always Akhenaten? And so as an experiment, we created a different database in which we replaced the king of Egypt with Akhenaten in every case. And then we reran generating the sociograms, the images, and we're like, whoa, if all of these were actually to Akhenaten, look how much more important he gets in the network, right? And then ran it again. What if they were all sent to Amenhotep iii? And you're like, whoa. Well, of course that was just an experiment, and we couldn't say that for sure. But what we were able to conclude is, look, the validity of the images and the sociograms and your analyses are contingent on what Kind of data goes in, right? Good data in, good data out, bad data in, bad data out. So I did put one of those in the book. What if it were Akhenaten, which for me is an interesting thought experiment, but the rest of it is going into detail and saying, okay, look where this guy. And I actually describe where you find him in the sociogram. And I say, look how important this guy is. We had already thought he was that important. Just from the mentions in the text, the sociogram is confirming what we already thought. So it's frequently a new way of looking at old data, and it can confirm what you already thought. Sometimes it can show you new things that you never imagined, like, you know, patterns that you couldn't see. You know, in a way it's like, you know, using it for big data, where there's just too much data and you get lost. But if you apply this, then you're like, ah, I can see the pattern here. So I thought it would. Would be of interest to end the book with, you know, okay, having discussed the race to translate and then having discussed what's in the tablets, let me show you the type of work that's being done now. You know, we're still having people talking about how to translate and all of that. In fact, there's another book coming out by a colleague and friend of mine in a couple weeks on exactly that, the Language of the Imarnal Letters. Because it turns out it's not just Akkadian, it's Canaanite Akkadian. It's, you know, specifically the dialect in Canaan that the petty kings are using, and that's different from the Akkadian that the Babylonians and the Assyrians are using. So there's still work to be done on reading and the grammar and all of that, but there's also new work that can be done on the analyses and the networks and all of that. So I wanted to end the book by saying, look, this isn't just dead history. It's not just ancient history. We're still learning things all the time. And then I also wonder aloud, where are the other archives? Because there have to be other archives. If they took the living part, the part that was still valid from Amarna down to Luxor and kept going in the time of Tutmosis, or not tutmosis. King Tut. Where's King Tut's archive? It's got to be down there in Luxor somewhere, right? And then where are the archives of other people? We know Ramses II is in touch with other people like the Hittites. Where's his archive? So I think it's just a matter of time before we find other archives. And we already have one from Mari from the 1800s. We have the Hittites. We have some from Ugarit, also in the late Bronze Age. And this one from Egypt. There must be more. And that's in part how we're going to shed more light on the late Bronze Age and I think find out how even more wonderful it was than we even suspect right now. So I would say stay tuned, right? There's more stuff that's going to come out. I just don't know when or where, who's going to discover it and who's going to publish it. We'll see.
- [66:12]
B
And I look forward to reading the book that you write about them. So that will be a treat for me and for certainly other readers. This was so much fun. I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to you about the book. You really, when talking about it, you know, you make it come alive as much as you do with your writing. So, you know, I look forward to seeing, you know, what further things you produce. And, you know, maybe, you know, we'll meet at the new museum once they get more letters in.
- [66:43]
A
That would be wonderful. Yes, I would look forward to that. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [66:48]
B
Thank you so much for being a guest, Eric. It was really wonderful to speak with you.
- [66:51]
A
That's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.