How Common Sense Helps Determine How Many Years the Amarna Letters Corpus Encompasses

The Amarna letters are a unique collection of correspondence between Egyptian royalty and the pharaohs’ vassal “mayors” in the Levant and with the monarchs of other Middle Eastern kingdoms. How many years of correspondence does the corpus include? The Wikipedia article “Amarna letters” cites the translator and author of The Amarna Letters, Professor William L. Moran. He stated that the chronology of the letter corpus, “both relative and absolute, presents many problems, some of bewildering complexity…”

Prof. Moran wrote that the corpus began perhaps as early as Amenhotep III’s Year 30, which was a reasonable estimate. However, he said the duration of the corpus could have been as little as 15 years and as much as 30, and it might have extended to Year 2 of Tutankhamun when the young king abandoned the city Amarna (Akhet-Aten) and moved his capital to Thebes. How can a common-sense approach help determine how many years the letter corpus includes?

Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) had his workers inscribe the foundation date of his new city, Akhet-Aten, on several boundary stelae around the building site. That date, IV Peret 13, Year 5, was only about three months into his fifth year. His father, Amenhotep III, never lived in Akhet-Aten, and his correspondence had ended with his death more than four years earlier. The king’s men must have transported all the earlier correspondence of Amenhotep III extant in the corpus and the first four years of Amenhotep IV from his previous capital, Thebes, to his new city.

Although only a few chronological clues exist in the letters from the southern Levant, those from the central and northern Levant and in international correspondence are relatively abundant. These include a few specific Egyptian dates, the backbone-like correspondence of the mayor of Gubla (Byblos), several statements of time intervals in years, many annual and seasonal details, probable references and allusions to four Egyptian heb sed celebrations (Jubilees), and mentions of dry periods and one severe drought relatable to narrow rings in the astronomically anchored Aegean Dendrochronology Master Index. Additionally, one unique celestial record directly relates to a specific year in that collection. The 54-page “Appendix H, Chronological Clues in the Amarna Letters and Related Materials” in The Six Pillars meticulously examines the evidence from the corpus and contemporaneous Hittite treaty prologues. What does that composite evidence tell us?

Several lines of evidence lead to the same conclusion: No Amarna letters are datable to later than Amenhotep IV’s Year 5; the most reliably datable series of letters from the later years end precisely in Years 4 or Year 5. These terminal dates cannot be a coincidence since they closely coincide with the establishment of the king’s new capital city. These details imply that the entire collection was an archive the pharaoh’s workers transported from Thebes. In other words, the king arbitrarily decided which initial year in the Theban archives he would include in the archives of his new city, and his staff transferred all the correspondence between that year and the present.

Based on some very ambiguous evidence and feeble arguments, some scholars insist that the corpus extended into the reign of Tutankhamun some 17 or more years after his father (Amenhotep IV or Akhenaten) had established his new city. Not only are no letters datable to this interim period, but this hypothesis is contrary to common sense:

Since Amenhotep IV had a specific number of years of foreign archives transported from his old capital to his new one, would Tutankhamun have done any less? Young King Tut must have also arbitrarily chosen which years in the Amarna archives he would have his servants move to Thebes. It is unimaginable that the pharaoh would have intentionally abandoned foreign correspondence that had arrived in recent years. Thus, the evidence strongly implies he chose to include all the letters received in Akhet-Aten from its foundation year up to the time of the transfer of his government back to Thebes. Those cuneiform tablets he left behind in Akhet-Aten make up the Amarna letters corpus. Thus, they include only about 13 years of international correspondence.