Amarna letters
[5] The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period.
These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.
[6][7] These letters, comprising cuneiform tablets written primarily in Akkadian – the regional language of diplomacy for this period – were first discovered around 1887 by local Egyptians who secretly dug most of them from the ruined city of Amarna, and sold them in the antiquities market.
[9] Émile Chassinat, then director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, acquired two more tablets in 1903.
[10] The initial group of letters recovered by local Egyptians have been scattered among museums in Germany, England, Egypt, France, Russia, and the United States.
[16] The archive contains a wealth of information about cultures, kingdoms, events and individuals in a period from which few written sources survive.
The tablets consist of over 300 diplomatic letters; the remainder comprise miscellaneous literary and educational materials.
They also contain the first mention of a Near Eastern group known as the Habiru, whose possible connection with the Hebrews—due to the similarity of the words and their geographic location—remains debated.
Specifically, the letters include requests for military help in the north against Hittite invaders, and in the south to fight against the Habiru.
Message of Tagi: To the King (Pharaoh), my lord: "I have listened carefully to your missive to me ...(illegible traces)"[19][20]Amarna Letters are politically arranged in a rough counterclockwise fashion: Amarna Letters from Syria/Lebanon/Canaan are distributed roughly: Early in his reign, Akhenaten, the pharaoh of Egypt, had conflicts with Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, who had courted favor with his father, Amenhotep III, against the Hittites.
[21] An Amarna letter preserves a complaint by Tushratta to Akhenaten about the situation: I...asked your father Mimmureya [i.e., Amenhotep III] for statues of solid cast gold, ... and your father said, 'Don't talk of giving statues just of solid cast gold.
Consensus obtains only about what is obvious, certain established facts, and these provide only a broad framework within which many and often quite different reconstructions of the course of events reflected in the Amarna letters are possible and have been defended.
Moran notes that some scholars believe one tablet, EA 16, may have been addressed to Tutankhamun's successor Ay or Smenkhkare.
