Love, War, and Diplomacy
The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East
In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Love, War, and Diplomacy tells the story of the Amarna Letters and the dramatic world of the Bronze Age they revealed.
Blending scholarly expertise with painstaking detective work, Eric Cline describes the spectacular discovery, the fierce competition among dealers and museums to acquire the tablets, and the race by British and German scholars to translate them. Dating to the middle of the fourteenth century BCE and the time of Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessors, Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten, the Amarna Letters are the only royal archive from New Kingdom Egypt known to exist. In them, we learn of royal marriages, diplomatic negotiations, gift-giving, intrigue, and declarations of brotherly love between powerful rulers as well as demands made by the petty kings in Canaan who owed allegiance to Egypt’s pharaohs.
A monumental achievement, Love, War, and Diplomacy transports readers to the glorious age of the Amarna Letters and the colonial era that brought them to light and reveals how the politics, posturing, and international intrigues of the ancient Near East are not so unlike today’s.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Cline (After 1177 B.C.) recounts in this illuminating study the 1887 discovery of a cache of cuneiform tablets that turned out to be a collection of correspondence between the most powerful rulers of the late Bronze Age. The colorful figure E.A. Wallis Budge, an antiquities dealer with "an outsize personality and a penchant for flouting local regulations," acquired the cache for the British Museum from an Egyptian "peasant woman" who "uncovered the archive while digging for fertilizer"—a story that, Cline notes, was likely "concocted" to hide Budge's more illicit activities. The tablets incited a race to decipher them among turn-of-the-century scholars, who were shocked to discover a world much like their own, where "a handful of Great Powers... balanced each other off" before the collapse of Bronze Age society, "much as the changing alliances in nineteenth-century Europe maintained the peace for a century until it was shattered by World War I." Through his own close reading, Cline sees parallels to the present, including evidence of the city states of Canaan—"Jerusalem, Byblos, Beirut, Tyre, Damascus, and Gaza"—being manipulated via proxy wars by the era's great powers. Cline persuasively argues that the late Bronze Age—with its precarious interdependence—closely resembled the modern "globalized" world. The result is both a remarkable glimpse into deep history and a savvy examination of an academic discipline's evolution.
