The Lexical Texts from Akhetaten (Amarna)

El-Amarna letter EA 4. CDLI photograph ©Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin.

The cuneiform corpus from Akhetaten (Amarna), the short-lived capital of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten is, first of all, a diplomatic corpus, preserving the correspondence between the pharaoh and the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, Hatti, and numerous vassal kingdoms in Canaan. The more than 300 letters, found in the Records Office, shed an incomparable light on the history and diplomacy of the period. At this location, which functioned as a scribal workshop, archive, and school at the same time, a group of about 20 literary and lexical texts was found.

The Amarna scholarly tablets include traditional Mesopotamian lists, ad-hoc exercises and literary texts, and represent the remains of a school where scribes were introduced to cuneiform reading and writing. The literary texts famously include versions of the story of Adapa and the myth of Nergal and Ereškigal.

Only five tablets may be identified as traditional Mesopotamian lexical lists:

Weidner God List from Akhetaten EA 374. CDLI photograph ©British Museum, London.

With TuTaTi, S^a, and the Weidner God List, three out of four elementary texts used in the West are attested in Akhetaten (the fourth is Syllable Alphabet A). The most conspicuous absentee in Akhetaten is the ubiquitous thematic list Ura.

The only tablet that falls outside this pattern is the Diri exemplar, which is a much more advanced exercise. On the back of the Diri tablet there is a fragmentary exercise letter in which the king of Egypt complains about the behaviour of the messengers of the addressee.

What makes the Akhetaten corpus unique is the presence of the hieroglyphic writing system, of local origin and with a long and prestigious tradition. The main and perhaps only use of cuneiform in this context was international correspondence - there was little virtue in collecting traditional cuneiform scholarly literature for its own sake. The prestige factor that brought learned and very learned cuneiform compendia to Emar, Ugarit and Hattuša had little weight here. The existence of several ad-hoc exercises (including an Egyptian - Akkadian vocabulary in cuneiform), not based on any traditional Babylonian example, may be understood in this same light. Scribes at Egypt may not have felt the weight of tradition and may have experienced more freedom to select and adapt whatever was relevant to them.

Further reading

• Artzi, Pinhas 1990 Studies in the Library of the Amarna Archive. Pp. 139-56 in Bar-Ilan Studies in Assyriology Dedicated to Pinhas Artzi, eds. Jacob Klein and Aaron Skaist. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press.
• Artzi, Pinhas 1992 Nippur Elementary Schoolbooks in the "West" in Nippur at the Centennial. Papers Read at the 35e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Philadelphia, 1988, ed. Maria De Jong Ellis. Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 14. Philadelphia: The University Museum.
• Izre'el, Shlomo 1997 The Amarna Scholarly Tablets. Cuneiform Monographs 9. Groningen: Styx Publications.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Akhetaten (Amarna)', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/akhetaten/]