The Amarna letters (sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets) are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten (el-Amarna), founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s – 1330s BC) during the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are mostly written in Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, rather than that of ancient Egypt. The known tablets total 382: 24 tablets had been recovered since the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's landmark edition of the Amarna letters, Die El-Amarna-Tafel, published in two volumes (1907 and 1915).[1] The written correspondence spans a period of at most thirty years.
The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics, since they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in pre-biblical times. The letters, though written in Akkadian, are heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who spoke an early form of Canaanite, the language family which would later evolve into its daughter languages, Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.[2][3]
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