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.
[Illustration: Amarna Tablets from the British Museum. The tablets
comprise correspondence between the rulers of the nations and
city-states of western Asia and the Egyptian Pharaohs Amenhotep III and
Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton).]
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.