conspiring readily with the Hittite foes of the Court. His insolence
helped him successfully out of these awkward difficulties also whenever
the matter came under discussion. When preparing fresh raids he did not
hesitate to invent news of Hittite invasions which he was bound to resist,
and all territory which he then took from his co-vassals would, according
to his own account, otherwise certainly have fallen into the hands of the
enemy. But as the result was always the same—_i.e._, to the advantage of
Aziru alone—the opinion began to prevail in Egyptian councils that this
restless vassal should be summoned to Court and tried. For many years
Aziru succeeded in evading these fatal and dangerous, or at best very
costly orders. But finally he was forced to obey, and with heavy heart and
well-filled treasure chests set off for Egypt. Apparently he relied on his
principal ally Dudu, whom in his letters he always addresses as “father”;
but this pleasant alliance did not avail to protect the disturber of the
peace from provisional arrest. The last letter in the Aziru series, which
had obviously been confiscated and subsequently found its way back into
the archives, is a letter of condolence from the adherents or sons of
Aziru to their imprisoned chief. Nevertheless, the political activity of
the Amorite chief seemed to many Syrian, and especially to Phœnician
princes as on the whole for the good of the land, and, therefore, to be
supported. His appearance put the longed-for end to a far less endurable
condition of things. Two communications from Akizzi, the headman of the
city of Katna, near Damascus, exhibit the difference clearly. When Akizzi
sent his first communication to Nimmuria every petty chief went raiding on
his own account: Teuwatta of Lapana, Dasha, Arzawia and all the rest of
them. These vanished with the entrance of Aziru upon the scene, though the
change was by no means welcome to Akizzi. In the Lebanon things were no
better. Here Namyauza was struggling with the headmen of Puzruna and
Khalunni. “They began hostilities together with Biridashwi against me and
said: ‘Come, let us kill Namyauza.’ But I escaped.” This promiscuous
warfare raged most fiercely in the south. Here a certain Labaya tried to
play the part taken by Aziru in the north. But fortune was less favourable
to Labaya. Probably he failed to induce his undisciplined officers to act
in unison, and the unhappy man’s sole achievement seems to have been the
welding of his foes into a compact body against himself. He lost his
territory, kept up the struggle a little longer as a freebooter, was taken
captive at Megiddo, escaped again on the eve of being shipped to Egypt,
and fell in battle or died a natural death after at length meeting
apparently with some success in Judæa.
Jerusalem was under a royal “Uweu,” a term perhaps best rendered
“captain,” named Abdikheba. A neighbouring prefect, Shuwardata, asserted
occasionally that he had entered into conspiracies with Labaya, and
Abdikheba in fact complained of hostilities on all sides. Milki-El and his
father-in-law Tagi, chiefs in the Philistian plain near Gath, were his
principal opponents. They recruited troops from among the Habiri in the
hope that Abdikheba, finding himself practically blockaded, would weary of
the struggle and abandon the field. He was evidently very nearly driven to
this when he wrote:
“Infamous things have been wrought against me. To see it would
draw tears from the eyes of the king, so do my foes press me.
Shall the royal cities fall a prey to the Habiri? If the Pidati do
not come in the course of this year, let the king send messengers
to fetch me and all my brethren that we may die in the presence of
the king, our lord.”
By the Habiri we must here understand no other than the Hebrews, who were
therefore already to be found in the “Promised Land,” but had not yet
firmly established themselves there. They swarmed in the Lebanon, where
Namyauza had formally enlisted one of their hordes; and yet it seems as if
they already held Shechem and Mount Ephraim as free tribal property. At
any rate, no letter thence to the king has been discovered, although there
is one mention of the city Shakmi (Shechem). The genuinely ancient
passages in the scriptural accounts of the conquest in the Book of Joshua,
and still more the valuable fragments in the first chapter of Judges, are
fairly in accordance with what we here learn from the tablets.
Abdikheba’s letters may be considered along with those of Milki-El and
Tagi, of whom Yanhamu, the powerful official, had just made an example.
Their voices take up the chorus of complaint:
ABDIKHEBA. “Lo! Milki-El and Tagi have done as follows.... Thus,
as the king liveth, hath Milki-El committed treachery against me.
Send Yanhamu that he may see what is done in the king’s land.”
MILKI-EL. “The king, my lord, shall know the deed done by Yanhamu
after I had been dismissed by the king. Lo, he took three thousand
talents from me and said to me, ‘Give me thy wife and thy sons
that I may slay them.’ May my lord, the king, remember this deed
and send us chariots to bring us away.”
TAGI. “Am I not a servant of the king? But my brother is full of
wounds so that I can send no message by him to the king. Ask the
_rabisu_ (a title of Yanhamu) whether my brother is not full of
wounds. But we turn our eyes to thee, to know whether we may rise
to heaven or creep into the earth; our heads remain in thy hand.
Behold, I shall try to make my way to the king by the hand of the
surgeons.”
MILKI-EL. “I have received the king’s message. Let him send the
Pidati to protect his servant, and grains of myrrh gum for
healing.”
As already pointed out, the blame for such occurrences belongs in the
first place to the Egyptian system of government. How little the petty
princes could expect, whether of good or evil, from their suzerain is
shown by glaring examples. King Burnaburiash complained that a Babylonian
trading company established by his ambassador in the Canaanite city of
Khinaton had, immediately after the ambassador’s departure, been attacked
and utterly plundered. The principals were killed, and the rest—some of
them mutilated—were sent into slavery. “Canaan is thy land; thou art king
of it,” continues Burnaburiash. “It was in thy land that I suffered this
injury; therefore restrain the doers of it. Replace the stolen gold, and
slay the murderers of my subjects to avenge their blood.” Whether this was
done was extremely doubtful, for part of the plunder had in all
probability already sufficed to secure a safe retreat for the brigands,
who, furthermore, were officials from some of whom letters have been
found. The natural consequence was that the ambassadors themselves were
attacked. Their caravan with gifts for Napkhuria was robbed twice in
succession, and they themselves were held to ransom. The Egyptian
Government nevertheless remained outrageously slack as ever, as we may see
from the following safe conduct granted on behalf of the Canaanite
miscreants: “To the princes in the land of Canaan, the vassals of my
brother. Akiya, my messenger, I send to the King of Egypt my brother.
Bring him safe and quickly to Egypt. Let no violence befall him.”
Prefects of Canaanite ports were naturally in most active communication
with Egypt. On some of the shrewder minds among these men it had dawned
that it pleased and amused the king to have immediate news of messages by
sea and land from far and near communicated in their letters. Abi-milki of
Tyre had carried this practice farthest, and he was also admirably skilful
in lodging complaints by the way. We owe to this worthy one of the
choicest pieces in the whole collection, the elegant pæan of a
place-hunter of more than three thousand years ago. It will be noticed
that some of his rhetorical expressions repeatedly recall those of the
Hebrew Psalter in the same way as do phrases in the letter of Tagi already
quoted. In fact, the Bible critic has much to learn from the tablets as a
whole. After the formal beginning, Abi-milki launches out as follows:
“My lord the king is the Sun-God, rising each day over the earth
according to the will of his gracious father, the heavenly Sun-God
(Aten). His words give life and prosperity. To all lands his might
giveth peace. Like the (Phœnician) god Ram-man, so he thunders
down from heaven, and the earth trembles before him. Behold, thy
servant writeth as soon as he has good news to send the king. And
the fear of my lord, the king, fell upon the whole land till the
messenger made known the good news from the king my lord. When I
heard through him the command of the king to me, ‘Be at the
disposal of my high officials,’ then thy servant answered his
lord, ‘It is already done.’ On my breast and on my back write I
down for myself the commands of the king. Verily, he who
hearkeneth to the king his lord, and serveth him with love, the
Sun-God riseth over him, and a good word from the mouth of his
lord giveth him life. If he heed not the commands of his lord his
city will fall, his house will perish, and his name will be known
no more for ever in all lands. But he who followeth his lord as a
faithful servant, his city is prosperous, his house is secure, and
his name shall endure for ever.”
The letter continues for some time in the same strain, but at the end the
courtier bethinks him of his office of informer, and adds hastily:
“Furthermore, Zimrida, the prefect of Sidon, sends a report every
day to Aziru, Abd-Ashera’s son. Every word that comes from Egypt
he telleth to him. I, however, tell it to my lord, that it may
serve thee, oh my lord!”
Two princes, Adad-nirari of Nukhashi and another whose name is now
illegible, apparently take a higher rank than their neighbours. Nukhashi
is often named in these tablets as well as in Egyptian inscriptions, and
it must have been situated on the north-east slope of the Lebanon range.
We have also letters from the towns of Biruta (Beyrout), Hashab, Hazi,
Kumidi, Kadesh on the Orontes, Sidon, Akko, Rubiza, Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer,
Gaza, Lachish, Shamhuna, Mushihuma, Dubu, and others, while there are many
more so mutilated that their origin can no longer be determined.
These letters, though by no means all of them containing important
contributions to the history of political intrigue, are often of interest
from the light they throw on manners and customs. A few further extracts
are therefore given here.
“To the king my lord, my gods, my sun; Yabitiri is thy servant,
the dust of thy feet, &c. And a faithful servant of the king am I.
I look hither, and I look thither, but it is not light; then I
look to the king my lord, then there is light. A brick may be
removed from its firm bed, but I move not away from the king’s
feet. Let my lord the king ask Yanhamu, his _rabisu_. While I was
still young he brought me to Egypt, and I served my lord the king
and stood at the gate of the palace (as page). And to-day, let my
lord the king ask his _rabisu_, I guard the gates of Gaza and of
Joppa. I am also attached to the Pidati of my lord the king;
whither they go thither do I go with them, as even now. On my neck
rests the yoke of my lord the king, and I bear it.”
The following tablet from the neighbourhood of the Jordan promises good
results as the reward of future research for geographical details:
“To Yanhamu, my lord: Mut-Addi is thy servant at thy feet. I told
thee before, and it is so indeed; Ayab hath fled in secret, as did
also previously the king of Bihishi before the commissioners of
the king his lord. Is Ayab now in Bihishi? [He is there] truly as
the lord king liveth, truly as he liveth. For two months he has
been there. Behold, Benenima is present, Tadua is present, Yashua
is present; ask them whether he hath fled from Shadi-Marduk, from
Astarti. When all the cities in the land of Gari were in
rebellion, Adma (Udumu), Aduri, Araru, Mishtu, Migdal, Ain-anab
and Sarki were taken, then later Hawani and Yabesh. Behold,
moreover, as soon as thou hadst written a letter to me I wrote to
him (Ayab) that thou hadst returned from thy journey (to
Palestine?). And behold he came to Bihishi and heard the command.”
The names Ayab and Yashua recall Job and Joshua to our minds.
The great alacrity shown in this letter was, as we already know, most
acceptable to Yanhamu. Another Syrian chief, whose name has been
obliterated, complained bitterly that Yanhamu had refused him a passage
through his territories, although he showed the royal summons to Court.
This, indeed, may have been an indirect favour to his correspondent. Very
amusing is a group of three synoptic letters, written by one scribe for
Biri ... (the name is imperfect) of Hashab, Ildaya ... of Hazi, and
another. These vassals had evidently taken the field together. They recite
their tale like a chorus of schoolboys repeating a lesson.
“Behold, we were besieging the cities of the king my lord in the
land of Amki (_i.e._, cities that had fallen away and had ceased
to pay tribute). Then came Itakama, the Prince of Kinza (Kadesh),
at the head of Hittites. Let my lord the king write to Itakama,
and cause him to turn aside and give us troops that we may win the
cities of my lord the king, and thenceforth dwell in them.”
Itakama was specially unpopular with his neighbours. Apparently he was one
of the more powerful allies of Aziru, and as such his special task was to
press as hard as possible on the foes of the Amorites in southern
Cœle-Syria. Perhaps, however, Aziru and Itakama did not come together till
each for a time had fought his battles alone. The Hittites in Itakama’s
force were, of course, prominently mentioned to alarm Pharaoh. They may
have been Hittite spearmen enrolled by the prince of Kadesh, much as the
Habiri and Sutu had been enlisted by his chief rival Namyauza. It is even
possible that the soldiers of Kadesh had always been armed in Hittite
fashion; perhaps the town was already inhabited by people of Hittite
stock. Later the Hittites actually seized Kadesh, and it is questionable
whether it was for the first time. Itakama himself, however, scouts any
thought of defection; nay, he writes:
“To the king my lord, &c. I am thy servant, but Namyauza hath
slandered me to thee, oh my master. And while he was doing that he
occupied all the inheritance of my fathers in the land of Kadesh,
and my villages hath he set on fire. Do not the officers of my
lord the king and his subjects know my faithfulness? I serve thee
with all my brethren, and where there is rebellion against my lord
the king, thither I march with my warriors, my chariots, and all
my brethren. Behold, now Namyauza hath delivered up to the Habiri
all the king’s cities in the land of Kadesh and in Ube. But I will
march forth, and if thy gods and thy sun go before me I will
restore these places from the Habiri to the king that I may show
myself subject to him. I will drive out these Habiri, and my lord
the king shall rejoice in his servant Itakama. I will serve the
king my lord, and all my brethren, and all lands shall serve him.
But Namyauza will I destroy, for I am for ever a servant of the
king my lord.”
The land of Ube here named corresponds to the Hobah of the Bible,
mentioned in Genesis xiv. 15, as the place to which Abram pursued the
conquerors of Sodom, who had carried Lot away. According to the margin of
the Revised Version, Hobah lay “north of Damascus.” In a letter from
Akizzi of Katna (see p. 44), we read, however, “Oh, my lord the king, as
Damascus in the land of Ube stretches out her hand to thy feet, so Katna
stretches out her hand to thy feet.” The statements may be reconciled by
the hypothesis that in the Old Testament the position of the town after
which the district is named is more exactly indicated. Other lands named
in the tablets are more difficult to identify. To mitigate a famine in
Gebal, Rib-Addi intended to send for grain from Zalukhi in Ugarit, but his
enemies detained his ships and frustrated his intentions. Zalukhi does not
seem to be mentioned again, and Rib-Addi in a later letter compares Ugarit
with the region round Tyre as regards its administrative relation to
Egypt. Abi-milki, the Tyrian prefect, once informs the king, “Fire hath
devoured the city of Ugarit; one half of it hath it destroyed and not the
other.” Finally, a certain Yapakhi-Addi, after an unsuccessful attempt to
get provisions into Rib-Addi’s city Simyra, reproachfully informs Yanhamu
that Aziru has extended his dominions from Gebal to Ugarit. Ugarit must
thus have been the most northerly of the Egyptian possessions in Asia, and
therefore not far from the site of the modern Alexandretta. This outlying
position made the little state a somewhat insecure jewel in the crown of
Egypt. King Kadashman-Bel seems to have been of this opinion when (see p.
27) he included in his little list of ladies impossible for a royal harem
“a maiden from Ugarit.” Evidently he meant to enumerate superciliously
petty foreign “princesses” only.
Of a certain land of Danuna (considered a part of Canaan) we learn further
that its king died, and that his brother succeeded to the throne
unopposed. One of the two may be identical with the king of Tana; who, as
Rib-Addi briefly mentions, was about to march to Gebal, but was forced by
scarcity of water to return home.
A few letters from women are among the tablets. Two probably came from the
wife of Milki-El, who was hard pressed by the Habiri when her husband was
called to Egypt. Two others are addressed, “The handmaid to my mistress”;
perhaps they were sent along with Tushratta’s letters to his daughter in
Egypt and were from one of her playfellows or relatives. Finally, the
daughter of Napkhuria, married to Burnaburiash, sent a small tablet to her
father by a special envoy named Kidin-Ramman. “Before the face of my lord
let him come” indicates that the letter was “to be delivered in person.”
It is a pity that this dainty little letter is for the most part
illegible.
V. POLITICAL CONDITIONS IN THE TELL EL AMARNA PERIOD.
However favourably the religious reform of King Napkhuria may be estimated
on its own merits, it by no means strengthened the authority of Egypt in
Asia. Of course it could have in no way been the cause of the state of
affairs in Syria and Canaan; perhaps Amenophis III., whatever his own
great slackness, simply inherited the confusion in this part of his
empire. The heaviest blows could not in the long run prevent the Habiri
from returning to the attack again and again at brief intervals. Their
need of expansion was greater than their fear, and, after all, it mattered
little to Pharaoh whether the Habirite or the Canaanite paid tribute in
Palestine as soon as the intruder was prepared to acknowledge his rights.
Napkhuria’s great weakness was his obvious partiality for those of his
officials who had become Aten worshippers, and the eagerness of these men
to exploit the royal favour was in proportion to their disbelief in the
permanence of the movement for reform.
In their Babylonian form the Tell el Amarna tablets are in the first place
the product of the diplomatic custom of the time, but in many details of
their contents they show that the civilisation of Western Asia had for
centuries been based on a Babylonian foundation. With the lack of exact
information so frequently to be deplored in Egyptian accounts, the wordy
narratives of the campaigns of Thutmosis III. scarcely enable us to
determine exactly from which of the greater powers he had succeeded in
wresting districts of Syria and Palestine. As regards the political
situation there, even at the beginning of the Kassite Dynasty—a change
probably attended by long internecine struggles—Babylonia seems to have
lost its western possessions on the Mediterranean, and we may rather
suppose that it was the kings of Mitani who ruled these territories in the
time of Thutmosis III.
Mitani, though still an extensive power, had seen its best days at any
rate when Tushratta with difficulty ascended the throne of his fathers.
The name “Hanirabbat” by which it was known to all its neighbours, must be
the older name, and also that of the original province to which later
acquisitions had been united. It is an established fact that Eastern
Cappadocia, the mountainous province of Melitene on the Upper Euphrates,
was still known as Hanirabbat about 690 B.C., and that, on the other hand,
Mitani, in the narrower sense of the term, must have corresponded to the
later Macedonian province of Mygdonia, _i.e._, Mesopotamia proper. We have
seen, however, that Ninua, afterwards the Assyrian capital Nineveh, was
part of the dominion of Tushratta, otherwise he could hardly have sent
Ishtar, the goddess of that city, to Egypt. The subsequent capital of
Assyria may have been the most easterly possession of the kingdom of
Hanirabbat-Mitani, the centre of gravity of which lay farther westward. In
the letters there is a remark of the king of Alashia recommending Pharaoh
to exchange no more gifts with “the kings of the Hittites and of
Shankhar.” Mitani is, perhaps, here named Shankhar from its dependencies
in Asia Minor, or we may suppose it to have been the name of Tushratta’s
residence.
In contrast to the Hittite empire, which was pressing forward from the
neck of Asia Minor through the passes of Issus into Syria, and was rapidly
increasing in power, Mitani stood on the eve of its fall. Babylonians and
Hittites were alike watching to pluck the ripe fruit, and perhaps it
lacked little to decide Tushratta, instead of fighting once more for the
crown, to capitulate to the invading Hittites and see the end of the
kingdom of Mitani. The great “love” of this king for Egypt was not,
therefore, called forth merely by the glitter of gold, but also by dire
political necessity. The catastrophe occurred some few decades after the
correspondence comes to an end for us. Mitani vanished from the states of
Western Asia and gave place to small Aramaic kingdoms, while the eastern
boundary, together with Ninua, was seized by Assyria as the first step to
her subsequent suzerainty in the East.
But still more swiftly overtaken of fate was the XVIIIth Dynasty in Egypt.
Napkhuria did not even see the completion of his city at Tell el Amarna,
for he died in 1370 B.C. His reform followed him, and the victorious
champions of Amon could raze to the ground the hated City of the Sun’s
Disk. They must already have been on the march when in a happy moment it
occurred to a keeper of the royal archives to conceal the clay tablets in
the earth and thus save them for remote posterity.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX
The best translation of the Tell el Amarna tablets available for English
readers is that from the German of H. Winckler, published by Luzac,
London, 1896.
Professor Flinders Petrie’s _Syria and Egypt from the Tell el Amarna
Letters_ (Methuen, 1898) is a synopsis of the letters as far as they
belong to the relations of Egypt and Syria, with the addition of
geographical and historical notes. In the Introduction Professor Petrie
gives a harrowing account of the casual way in which the tablets were
found and of the criminal carelessness with which these priceless records
were subsequently handled.
Some years afterwards, in 1891-2, Professor Petrie himself excavated what
was left of the ruins of the royal city of Amenhetep IV. An account of his
discoveries on that site and of his deductions from them may be found in
his finely illustrated memoir _Tell el Amarna_ (Methuen, 1894). He
particularly emphasises the skill and originality displayed in the remains
of the arts and crafts of the Tell el Amarna period, and emphatically
points out the evidence of active connection between Egypt and Ægean
(Mykenæan) civilisation at that time. His appreciation of the character of
Akhenaten differs considerably from that formed by the author of the
present pamphlet, and should be compared with it. In vol. ii. p. 205 _et
seqq._ of his _History of Egypt_, Professor Petrie maintains the same
views. The same volume also contains his earlier synopsis of the Tell el
Amarna tablets.