Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offer a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of the Levant during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE).

The book features a summary of the historical and scribal contexts of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets—a corpus of diplomatic letters between Canaanite and Egyptian rulers of the later 18th Dynasty—and provides a synthesis of research on cuneiform scribalism in the Late Bronze Age. It also offers a methodology for the multimodal analysis of Canaanite cuneiform tablets, which can be applied to other ancient corpora. Specifically, the proposed “code-alternation” approach offers a more accurate description of the range of linguistic, orthographic, and marking systems in the Canaanite Amarna Letters. The book sheds light upon the use of the cuneiform script and written Akkadian in diplomatic communications in the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, broadening our understanding of this period which was pivotal to the development of writing, scribal culture, and West Semitic literary traditions.

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age is suitable for scholars of the Late Bronze Age southern Levant and those interested in literacies and scribal practices of the Ancient Near East.