Ages in Chaos

תקופות בתוהו

Ages in Chaos

כרך א': מיציאת מצרים עד למלך אחנתון

Volume I: From the Exodus to King Akhnaton

פרק שישי

CHAPTER SIX

מכתבי אל-עמארנה

The el-Amarna Letters

עמנואל וליקובסקי

Immanuel Velikovsky

מכתבי אל-עמארנה ומתי הם נכתבו (

The el-Anwrna Letters and When They Were Written

A few small villages are scattered in the valley by the bank of the Nile where once stood Akhet-Aton, "the place where Aton rises." The site bears a name artificially composed by modern archaeologists, Tell el-Amarna. Ruins of temples, palaces, tombs, private dwellings, and workshops of craftsmen have been cleared of the desert sand that buried them for thousands of years.

In 1887 state archives were unearthed at Tell el-Amama. A fellah woman digging in her yard turned up some clay tablets with cuneiform signs; the story runs that she sold her find for the equivalent of two shillings. Samples sent to the LouvreMuseum were pronounced forgeries, but soon the scientific world recognized their genuineness.

During the ensuing years a hunt for the clay slabs was undertaken by many archaeologists on behalf of public and private collections. Meanwhile, the tablets had been scattered by unlicensed diggers and dealers in antiquities. Many were damaged, some broken into pieces by unskilled excavation, in the course of transportation, and, it is said, by partition among the clandestine excavators.

Up to the present over three hundred and sixty tablets have been recovered. With the exception of a few single tablets found in Palestine and in Syria, which obviously belong to the same collection, the entire lot is thought to have been found in or near the place recognized as the state archives of Akhet-Aton. Only a few tablets contain fragments of epic poems; all the others are letters exchanged between two successive kings of Egypt and their correspondents, the free kings of territories in the Middle East and Cyprus and various vassal kings and princes or officers in Syria and Palestine.

The kings in the north were not subject to the kings of Egypt, and they wrote "to my brother" and signed themselves "thy brother". The kings in Canaan and Syria, however, were under the scepter of the Nile dynasty and wrote "to my king, my lord" and signed themselves "thy servant". There are also letters addressed to certain dignitaries of the Egyptian court. Letters written by the pharaohs or in their names were obviously copies stored in the archives in order to preserve a record. The language of the tablets, with few exceptions, is Assyro-Babylonian (Akkadian), with many words in a Syrian dialect similar to Hebrew.1

The city of Akhet-Aton was built by the schismatic king Amenhotep IV, who abolished the cult of Amon of Thebes and introduced the cult of Aton, interpreted as the solar disk, and who changed his name to Akhnaton. But shortly after his reign the capital city of Akhet-Aton was abandoned, his religion was stamped as heresy, and his images were mutilated. His son-in-law, the young pharaoh Tutankhamen, reigned briefly in the old capital, Thebes. Then the dynasty became extinct. Akhet-Aton had a short history of only about twenty-five years before it was deserted by its inhabitants.

The time of the letters can be established with some precision. They were addressed to Nimmuria (Ni-ib-mu'-wa-ri-ia, Mi-im-mu-riia, Im-mu-ri-ia), who was Amenhotep III, and to Naphuria (Na-ap-hu-ru-ri-ia, Nam-hur-ia), who was Amenhotep IV (Akhnaton). The letters sent to Amenhotep III were presumably brought to Akhet-Aton from the archives at Thebes.

Long rows of shelves are filled with books and treatises dealing with these letters, which until recently were the most ancient exchange of state letters preserved. The science of history, it is thought, is in possession of historical testimony on a period previous to the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan. One of the main objects of investigation was to identify places and peoples named in the letters.

In the tablets written by the vassal king of Jerusalem (Urusalim) to the pharaoh, repeated mention is made of the "Habiru", who threatened the land from east of the Jordan. In letters written from other Places, there is no reference to Habiru, but an invasion of sa-gaz-mesh (sa-gaz is also read ideographically habatu and translated at "cutthroats", "pillagers") is mentioned over and over again. With the help of various letters it has been established that Habiru and sagaz (habatu) were identical. In letters from Syria the approach of the king of Hatti to the slopes of the mountains of Lebanon was reported with terror.

The impression received is that these invasions--of Habiru from the east and of the king of Hatti from the north--menaced Egyptian domination of Syria, a domination which, it was learned, actually ceased shortly after the reign of Akhnaton. In their letters the vassals incessantly ask for help against the invaders and often also against one another. King Akhnaton, "the first monotheist in world history",2 did not care for his empire; he was immersed in his dream of "a religion of love." Little or no help was sent; the mastery of the pharaohs over Syria and Canaan was broken, and the control of Egypt over her Asiatic tributary provinces was swept away.

השם "מלך של חתי" מובן בדרך כלל כ"מלך של החיתים". בתקופה מאוחרת יותר--זו של סתי הראשון ורעמסס השני של השושלת התשע עשרה-היו מלחמות גדולות בין המלכים של חתי והפרעונים. בפרק העוסק בתקופה זו ההסטוריה של האימפריה הנשכחת של החיתים" תאובחן. "המלך של חתי" של תקופת אל-עמארנה משוער להיות אחד המלכים של "אימפריה נשכחת" זו.

The name "king of Hatti" is generally understood as "king of the Hittites." In a later period--that of Seti I and Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty-there were great wars between the kings of Hatti and the pharaohs. In a chapter dealing with that period the history of the "forgotten empire of the Hittites" will be analyzed. "The king of Hatti" of the el-Amarna period is supposed to have been one of the kings of that "forgotten empire."

The name Habiru, mentioned in the letters of the king of Jerusalem, became an important issue and gave rise to the following conjecture: these invaders could have been the Hebrews under Joshua drawing near to the borders of Canaan. The Habiru, too, emerged from the desert and approached the land from the other side of the Jordan. Arriving at the Promised Land during the time of Amenhotep III and Akhnaton, they were supposed to have left Egypt sometime in the days of Thutmose III or Amenhotep II.

This does not seem to be a well-founded construction, because these monarchs were conquerors and despots, too strong to allow the Israelites to put off the yoke of bondage. Other scholars have refused to identify the Israelites with the Habiru because the Hebrews were thought still to have been in Egypt at the time of Akhnaton, and the sole opportunity they would have had to leave would have been during a period of anarchy, when the once powerful dynasty was dying down, or during the interregnum following the extinction of that dynasty: these would have been the only times suitable for the rebellion of the slaves and their departure. In that view the Habiru came in one of the waves of nomads eager to settle in the land of Canaan; other waves must have followed, one of them being the Israelites under Joshua ben Nun.

In the introductory chapter of this book I dwelt on the various theories relative to the time of the Exodus. There it was explained that a large group of scholars cannot compromise even on an Exodus at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but have chosen Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus, holding the Exodus to be an insignificant event in the history of Egypt; or they select Ramses to be the Pharaoh of Oppression and his son Merneptah the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

As the el-Amarna tablets, in the opinion of these scholars, preceded the Exodus, the Habiru could not possibly have been the Israelites. Another link was sought to connect the narrative of the Scriptures with the details unfolded in the letters. A parallel to Joseph was found in the Egyptian courtier of Semitic name and obviously Semitic origin, (דודו) Dudu,3 whose memory is preserved not only as the addressee of a few el-Amarna letters but also as the owner of a rich sepulcher in Akhet-Aton. (המלך אחנתון, נכסף לתת מתנה מיוחדת למקורביו, הציג כל אחד עם קבר שנבנה בחיי המקורב ונחקק עם ארועים מחיי המלך ומשפחתו, בעל הקבר-אך בדרך כלל לא של משפחתו--נחקק כדמות קטנה המקבלת מתנות מהמלך. בקבר של דודו ישנן גם דמויות של שמיים שמחים בגמולים של דודו. מכתב שנכתב לדודו זה יצוטט בהמשך.) King Akhnaton, desirous of making a special gift to his favorites, presented each with a tomb built during the lifetime of the recipient and engraved with scenes from the life of the king and his family, the owner of the tomb-but usually not his family--being portrayed as a small figure receiving honors from the king. In the tomb of Dudu there are also figures of Semites rejoicing at Dudu's rewards. A letter written to this Dudu will be quoted later on.

Still another resemblance to Joseph was found in the person of Ianhama,4 who according to the references in the el-Amarna letters, was an Egyptian chief in charge of the granaries of the state, where grain was bought by the Canaanite princes. There was a famine in the land, and it is an unceasing cry for grain that we hear from the letters of the king of Gubla and Sumur (Sumura).

One further conjecture may be recorded. The visit of Isaac and Rebecca or of Abraham and Sarah to Egypt5 was linked to some references to a handmaid of the goddess of the city of Gubla and her husband, who were in Egypt. The king of Gubla and Sumur supported the couple in their desire to return to Canaan, if he did not actually ask for their extradition.

But the theory identifying the Habiru and the Hebrews was not abandoned; it seemed that otherwise the histories of these twopeoples of antiquity, the Egyptians and the Hebrews, who inhabited neighboring countries, would show no connecting link in the course of many hundreds of years of their early history. The other possible link-the Merneptah stele, with which I shall deal later-was also interpreted both in support of and against the Habiru-Hebrew theory.

The equation Habiru-Hebrews is still accepted by a large number of scholars: at the time when the el-Amarna letters were written the Israelite nomads of the desert were knocking at the gates of the land which they had come to conquer. Did this opinion contradict the scheme according to which the Israelites were still in bondage under Ramses II? If so, then the conception had to be formulated anew, and the migration of the Hebrews was then supposed to have proceeded in consecutive stages. Reconciling theories were put forth dividing the Exodus into several successive departures, the Rachel clan and the Leah clan leaving at different times; when the former reached Canaan the latter was still being oppressed in Egypt and followed later. Another theory had the Josephites coming from Egypt and the Jacobites directly from Mesopotamia; still another variation had the Jacobites coming from Egypt and the Abrahamites from the north.

A further difficulty presented by the equation Habiru-Hebrews arose from the fact that no person in the Book of Joshua could be identified in the el-Amarna letters. When the Israelites entered Canaan, Adonizedek was king of Jerusalem, Hoham king of Hebron, Piram king of Jarmuth, Japhia king of Lachish, and Debir king of Eglon (Joshua 10:3). Among the letters there are a number written by kings of some of these places but not by these kings. Much more important is the fact that there is little similarity in the events described in both sources. The episode of the siege of Jericho, the most remarkable occurrence in the first period-of the conquest, is missing in the letters, and Jericho is not mentioned at all. This silence is strange, if the Habiru were the Hebrews under Joshua. No contemporaneous event can be traced in the letters.

The pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty, Seti and Ramses II, left memorial monuments in Egypt and in Palestine regarding their passage through Palestine as conquerors of the land lost by the pharaohs of the el-Amarna period or by their successors. In the Books of Joshua and Judges, covering over four hundred years, nothing suggests the hegemony of Egypt or her interference in the affairs of Canaan.

For all these reasons it seemed too bold to place the story of the conquest by the Hebrews so far back in time. The discussion is still in progress. Some of those who could not accept the theory that the Hebrews had already entered Canaan at the time of Amenhotep III and Akhnaton identified the Habiru as the Apiru, the workers in the Egyptian quarries on the Sinai Peninsula, on their seasonal journey from there to their homes in Lebanon; others identified them as migrants from the Babylonian district of Afiru.

How could the Hebrews have reached Canaan before they left Egypt? Or how could they have left their bondage in Egypt before it was weakened?

לפי הסכמה הכרונולוגית שלי, מכתבי אל-עמארנה, שנשלחו והתקבלו על ידי אמנחותפ השלישי ואחנתון, נכתבו, לא בין 1410- ל-1370- כמקובל בדרך כלל, אלא ב-870- עד 840-, בזמנו של המלך יהושפט בירושלים. אם תאוריה זו נכונה בין אוסף לוחות אל-עמארנה עלינו לצפות...

According to my chronological scheme, the letters of el-Amarna, sent and received by Amenhotep III and Akhnaton, were written, not in -1410 to -1370 as is generally accepted, but in -870 to -840, at the time of King Jehoshaphat in Jerusalem.6 If this theory is correct, among the tablets of the el-Amarna collection we should expect to find letters written by the royal scribes, skilled in cuneiform, in the name of the Israelite kings of Jerusalem and of Samaria. The most prolific writer of letters among the princes and chiefs was the king of Sumur (Samaria). About sixty letters of his are preserved, fifty-four of them addressed to the king of Egypt. The pharaoh even wrote to him: "Thou writest to me more than all the regents."

The three hundred and sixty letters, linking the political past of the great and small nations of the Near East at an important period of remote antiquity, were objects of prolonged study in the interest of Egyptian, Babylonian, Hittite, Syrian, and Canaanite histories.

את ההצהרה שנעשתה לעיל לגבי הזמן של המכתבים אין לקבל רק בגלל התאמתה לסכימה שנבנתה על ראיות אחרות של תקופות קודמות או עוקבות. היא חייבת להיות מוכחת ביחס למכתבים עצמם. בצד התנ"ך ולוחות אל-עמארנה, שני מקורות אחרים קשורים לזמנו של המלך יהושפט: מצבת מישע מלך מואב והכתובות של מלך אשור, שלמנאסר השלישי. שרידים אלו, גם כן, ולא התנ"ך לבדו, חייבים להתאים לתוכנם של מכתבי אל-עמארנה, אם זה נכון שההסטוריה המצרית חייבת לעבור שיפוץ ולזוז יותר מחמש מאות שנים קדימה.

The statement made above as to the time of the letters should not be accepted merely because it fits into a scheme built on other evidences of preceding or following periods. It should be demonstrated with respect to the letters themselves. Besides the Scriptures and the el-Amarna tablets, two other sources relate to the time of King Jehoshaphat: the stele of King Mesha of Moab and the inscriptions of the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser III. These relics, too, and not the Bible alone, must correspond to the contents of the el-Amarna letters, if it is true that Egyptian history must be revised and moved forward more than half a thousand years.

1. The translations into German are by Hugo Winckler and by J. A. Knudtzon. The work of the last-named Scandinavian scientist is of classical value for the study of the Tell el-Amarna tablets. The translation into English is by S. A. B. Mercer (1939). Twelve letters found since the publication by Knudtzon are included in Mercer's English edition. The letters are similarly numbered in Knudtzon's and Mercer's editions. In this chapter quotations from the letters are taken from the English version of Mercer (The Tell el-Amarna Tablets [Toronto, 1939]). However, the translations have been checked in Knudtzon's version.

2. Breasted, Weigall, Freud.

3. Mercer, The Tell el-Amarna Tablets, pp. 510ff.; Barton, Archaeology and the Bible, P. 368; H. Ranke, in Zeitschrift fr Aegyptische Sprache, LVI (1920), 69-71. Albright, "Cuneiform Material for Egyptian Prosopography," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, V (1946), 22, n. 62.

4. Cf. Marquart, Chronologische Untersuchungen. pp. 35ff., and Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients (2nd ed.; Leipzig, 1906), pp. 390ff.

5. 0. Weber in J. A. Knudtzon, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln (Leipzig, 1915), p. 1172.

6. The readers of this chapter are advised to read beforehand I Kings 16-22; II Kings 1-10; and II Chronicles 16-22.

ירושלים, שומרון ויזרעאל

Jerusalem, Samaria, and Jezreel

The letters of el-Amarna provide us with the names of princes and governors in Syria and Palestine and with the names of cities and walled places. Up to now not one of the personal names has been identified, and only several of the geographical names have been traced. I shall identify some important geographical locations and also a series of personal names.

Urusalim of the el-Amarna letters could not be misunderstood; there was no difficulty in recognizing it as Jerusalem. The difficulty arose only with respect to the passages in the Scriptures7 according to which the pre-Israelite city was called Salem or Jebus, and not Jerusalem. It was decided that the el-Amarna letters exposed the error of these statements. If, however, the el-Amarna letters were written in the Israelite period, the above conflict does not exist.

Sumur (also Sumura) and Gubla are the most frequently named cities in the el-Amarna letters, each being mentioned more than one hundred times. Other cities are not mentioned even ten or fifteen times. "No king's or prince's name is given for this city Sumur, next to Gubla the most frequently referred to; despite the distress that came upon her, no letter from there is to be found in the entire el-Amarna correspondence."8

It is obvious from the content of the letters that Sumur was the "most important place" in Syria-Palestine and apparently also the seat of the deputy administering the region. It was a fortress.9 A king's palace was there, and the frequent mention of this palace in the letters to the pharaoh gives the impression that it was a wellknown building.

Sumur or Sumura was Samaria (Šemer, Šomron, in Hebrew). It could not be presumed that Sumur was Samaria because it was in the reign of Omri, father of Ahab, that this city was built, and in the period preceding the conquest of Joshua, of course, it had not existed.

I KINGS 16:24 And he [Omri] bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of silver, and built on the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of Shemer, owner of the hill, Samaria.