[ The Amarna letters are correspondences between Egypt, Egypts Vassels and

various powers in the Ancient Near East such as Babylon, Assyria, Hatti and
Mitanni and show evidence of what may have been the first international
diplomatic system with rules and conventions concerning negotiations.
[ [ The majority of the letters were written in Akkadian using the cuneiform script
which was the diplomatic language in that time and they date back to the 14 th
Century BC, The Late bronze age 2a using Finkelsteins chronology.
[The first letters were found in 1887 by local Egyptians in
[Amarna who dug them up in secret and sold them onto the Antiquities market.
[Amarna is highlighted in blue on the map and it is from this location that they
get their name. This nomenclature may lead to the letters as being perceived as
sources mainly for Ancient Egypt but most of the letters found were received by
Egypt from their vassals and other powers in the Near East. These letters being
written and sent by Ancient Near Eastern peoples gives information about the
international relations and political developments of the area as well as provides
insight into the culture and language of late bronze age Canaanite peoples.
[382 letters have been identified to date.
[French cuneiformist Jean Nougayrol divided the letters into two main groups,
letters describing what has been sent, for example, food, materials, weapons,
and military assistance, and the second group being letters asking for the
aforementioned. There are also a small number of letters which are thought to be
training material for scribes including epics, god lists and translations for words.
[The Amarna Letters were excavated at different times and by different groups
which has resulted in them being housed in different museums around the
[world such as the Vorderasiatisches Museum, the British museum, the Louvre
and the Egypttian Museum. Jrgen Alexander Knudtzon, a nowegian linguist was
the first to publish about the letters in two volumes in 1907 and 1915 called Die
El-Amarna-Tafeln and the first English translation was published in 1992 in
William Morans the Amarna letters.