The eccentric pharaoh and the ‘Wikileaks of the Bronze Age’
Intrigue, whining, and negotiations—all these and more can be found in one of the greatest troves of ancient diplomatic communications.
Welcome back to Stones & Bones, National Geographic’s paleontology and archaeology newsletter!
I’m historian Candida Moss. Today we turn our eye to uncovering the diplomatic intrigue of the ancient world.
A mere 3,400 years ago, one of Egypt’s greatest, most enigmatic, and, to be polite, let’s say eccentric pharaohs got one of the most revolutionary ideas in history in his head. Amenhotep IV, as he was then known, threw out thousands of years of polytheistic Egyptian practice and demanded a new religion that revolved around just one god, Aten. He also, as one does in such moments of outlandish hubris, changed his name to Akhenaten, which meant, ahem, “effective for Aten.”
It wasn’t just the spiritual world of the Egyptians that would experience such a seismic shift. Akhenaten relocated the superpower’s capital north from Thebes to an empty plot of desert. Almost overnight, a city rose in an area we now call Amarna. For roughly three decades it attracted dignitaries from all over the world to a metropolis in the middle of nowhere.
Three millennia later, hundreds of tablets from what was briefly the most important city in Egypt were discovered in and around Amarna (a fascinating and controversial story in its own right that we’ll maybe get to someday). They document diplomatic relations between Egypt and the major power players of the ancient world. But far from being stodgy diplomatic texts about grain or taxes, they tell of petty rivalries, snarky monarchs, a missing Babylonian princess, ostentatious displays of wealth, and accusations of fraudulent gifts. Assyriologist Selena Wisnom, author of the recent book The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History, called them “the Wikileaks of the Bronze Age.”
Behind the letters sent by monarchs and vassal kings is the unseen world of the scribes and emissaries who wrote and delivered the letters and who formed the backbone of ancient diplomacy. Now, new evidence shines a light on their work, shows how they helped avert political disasters, and (!!) suggests that at least one of them was a foreign agent.
The Amarna Letters form the bulk of a collection of 380 clay tablets that were discovered in or not far from Tell el Amarna, on the east bank of the Nile roughly halfway between the north (Memphis, near modern-day Cairo) and south (Thebes, now Luxor) of ancient Egypt. The tablets date to the 14th century B.C., spanning the end of the reign of Amenhotep III (1399-1350 B.C.), the reign of his son Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten (1349-1332 B.C.), and the early years of Tutankhamun. The letters give us a glimpse into the rich political world of this period, revealing tense and complex relationships.
“These are not announcements polished for public release, but the unfiltered complaints, demands, hopes, and requests of rulers all over the Near East as they write to the king of Egypt, the superpower of the day,” explained Wisnom when I caught up with her over a video call. In fact, you can read them and recognize patterns that continued into the modern era. “Less powerful states in the Levant asked for protection from threatening neighbors in return for their loyalty…while the giants of Assyria and Babylonia demanded to be treated as equals and complain when they are not. Marriages are an especially sore point—although it was common to send princesses abroad to marry foreign royalty, the king of Egypt never sends his daughters to anyone, which the others see as a slight.”
When they were initially discovered, the letters stunned Egyptologists because rather than being inscribed in hieroglyphics, they are written in Akkadian cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing. Cuneiform was a convenient tool for international diplomacy because much like the modern Latin alphabet, which handles many different languages, it could accommodate Hittite and Hurrian as well as Akkadian, a Semitic language used by Mesopotamian empires and the lingua franca of ancient diplomacy.
The scribes themselves are anonymous, but their work is distinct. Handwriting analysis allowed scholars to identify individual scribes based in different royal courts and cities around the ancient Mediterranean. Twenty-first-century petrographic analysis of the clay made it possible to compare the tablets with regional soil and ceramic types and identify where, exactly, each tablet was made. This, in turn, allows us to track the movement of the individual scribes. Some were mobile, while others were attached to a particular royal court. Stylistic features, language tics, and literary forms allowed scholars to deduce where the scribes were educated and where their allegiances lay.
And this is where things get interesting.
A new book, Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age by Alice Mandell, a professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Johns Hopkins University, follows the unseen world of people who wrote the Amarna Letters. She reveals a time of intrigue and shadow diplomacy and identifies a Tyrian scribe attached to the court of Abi-Milki of Tyre, an island under Egyptian control in modern Lebanon. This scribe—Scribe 2 of Tyre, if you’re counting—authored all 10 of the letters from the Tyrian king to the pharaoh asking for support.
“They’re on an island,” narrates Mandell, “and they need water, food, and fuel.” There’s a palpable sense of desperation.
Scribe 2’s work is striking for its use of Egyptian literary formulas and poetic material. “He had a more detailed knowledge,” said Mandell, “of Egyptian court culture than any other scribe from the ancient Levant.” Though he was Canaanite trained, he seems to have had personal contact with Egyptian scribes, knowledge of current affairs, and a detailed understanding of Akhenaten’s religious reforms. Mandell said that this scribe may have been an integral player in the founding of the Egyptian-sponsored regime at Tyre. He was stationed there “to smooth the passage of power between monarchs and keep a close eye on the Egyptian puppet king.” He was a foreign agent, but he was also looking out for the interests of the people of Tyre.
Then there is a well-educated scribe from Jerusalem who etched secondary messages on the reverse of the tablets he dispatched. These were not for the pharaoh’s eyes; they were Cliffs Notes intended to help the receiving scribe home in on the main takeaways of the longer message. Think of it as a hidden form of communication between scribes that helped them cut corners but, more important, avoid misunderstandings and political disasters.
This kind of care was valuable because miscommunication and perceived slights are everywhere in the letters. A particularly angry missive was sent to the pharaoh demanding to know the whereabouts of a Kassite (Babylonian) princess who had been sent to join the Egyptian court and had gone missing. In a snarky response, the pharaoh complains that the Babylonian envoys were “nonentities” and incompetent liars who simply hadn’t recognized her. Dig a little deeper, and the vitriolic spat was actually about missing gifts. Both sides dug in, and the pharaoh decided that if his gifts were going astray, he wasn’t going to send any more.
The Kassite king wasn’t the only ancient monarch with trust issues. In another pair of letters sent between the king of Arzawa (a domain in Cilicia, western Turkey) and the pharaoh, the paranoid king complains that he does not trust the Egyptian emissaries. “At the end of the letter,” said Mandell, “beneath a double line ruling, a slightly separate section says, ‘Look, you need to send me letters written only in Hittite because I do not trust your Akkadian scribes and messengers.’ ” And, to his credit, the pharaoh “snags somebody who’s able to write in Hittite” and responds.
The Amarna age lasted only 30 years. Within a few years of taking power, Tutankhamun (yes, that Tutankhamun) had restored the ways of his ancestors, and Akhenaten’s revolution was over, fated to be wiped from history.
Millennia would pass before Akhenaten’s city would be rediscovered.
In a first, scientists extract ancient human DNA from cave walls
Loyal readers of Stones & Bones will remember our last newsletter on National Geographic Explorer Genevieve von Petzinger and her team’s attempt to pull DNA from ancient cave paintings in Spain. Well, they did it! Read more about what they accomplished and what it might all mean.
Newly discovered sermons of St. Augustine
In 2024, Professor Christian Tornau, a researcher at the University of Würzburg, was invited to decipher a 12th-century manuscript in Poland. This routine assignment turned out to be a revelation, as two of the six sermons in the manuscript proved to be previously unknown sermons given by the fifth-century North African Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo. While almost 600 sermons by Augustine have already been published, these two deal with biblical witchcraft. In the Hebrew Bible, a troubled King Saul turns to a necromancer and has her summon the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel for advice on an upcoming battle (Samuel was less than happy about this). The story raised all kinds of questions. “Why are necromancers able to do this? Why is God letting this happen? If God can’t prevent it, maybe he isn’t all-powerful.” Augustine’s response came in two parts. In the first of the sermons, preached on a Sunday, Augustine raised those tough questions about the nature of God. He then let a few days pass before he weighed in on each question the following Wednesday.
Why? Tornau suggests that the audience was “given a certain amount of freedom to form their own thoughts.” But perhaps Augustine was being more pragmatic. He bemoaned that people preferred holding parties at the graves of deceased saints over attending his three-hour church services (to be fair to them, they had to stand the whole time). Whipping people into an existential frenzy about the nature of God on Sunday was a surefire way to bring them back to church the next week.
This week’s must-reads from around the web
Keep an eye out!
I’m planning to go to opening night of Christopher Nolan’s eagerly anticipated The Odyssey with some other classicists, including Homer expert Joel Christensen, author of the new book Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. I will have just gotten laser treatment, so there’s a chance I’ll be veiled and looking like a ghoulish victim of the Trojan War” changed to “A poor sense of timing means I will have just gotten a laser treatment, so there’s a chance I’ll be veiled and resembling a ghoulish victim of the Trojan War
