Love, War, and Diplomacy: Eric H. Cline on the Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed

“Two years and a half years ago, when coming down the Nile in a dahabiah, I stopped at . . . Tel el-Amarna. In the course of my exploration, I noticed . . . the foundations of a large building, which had just been laid bare by the natives. . . . A few months afterwards the natives, still going on with their work of disinterment, discovered among the foundations a number of clay tablets covered with characters the like of which had not previously been seen in the land of Egypt.”

Those were the words of Archibald Henry Sayce, linguist, valetudinarian, and eventually first Professor of  Assyriology at the University of Oxford. What he had noticed was the uncovering of the Amarna Letters, a set of clay tablets written in cuneiform, about which Sayce–and many others–would be intensively concerned. Finding these letters was like uncovering a file cabinet in the Pharoah of Egypt’s foreign ministry, suddenly providing a set of written sources that illuminated unknown areas of the past.

With me to talk about the Amarna letter is Eric H. Cline. He is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, and author most recently of Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed. This is his third appearance on the podcast.

For this episode's show notes, and other resources, go to the Historically Thinking Substack

Chapter Outline

1. Introduction & Discovery of the Amarna Letters (00:00)
2. Illicit Excavations & Context (04:45)
3. The Translation Race (14:52)
4. The World of the Letters: Great Kings & Diplomacy (29:00)
5. Local Rulers & Conflicts (43:08)
6. Social Network Analysis (51:57)
7. Modern Relevance & Conclusion (57:41)