NATURE 



49 



THURSDAY, MAY 19, 1S92. 



THE TELL EL- AM A RN A TABLETS IN THE 



BRITISH MUSEUM. 

 The Tell el-Amarna Tablets in the British Museum^ivith 



Autotype Facsimiles. (London : Printed by order of the 



Trustees, 1892.) 



DURING the summer of 1887, a woman belonging to 

 the household of one of the "antica" dealers 

 who live at or near Tell el-Amarna, in Upper Egypt, 

 set out to follow her usual avocation of digging in 

 the sand and loose earth at the foot of the hills for 

 small antiquities. Every man, woman, and child in 

 the neighbourhood spent, and probably still spends, 

 a large portion of each day in this profitable pursuit, 

 for in the winter season they were able to sell at 

 good prices the scarabs, rings, fragments of beautifully 

 glazed Egyptian porcelain, and other objects of this nature, 

 of which there seemed to be an endless supply in the 

 ground round about. From the time when Wilkinson 

 made his first journey to this place, until quite recently 

 every traveller who has visited the spot has been able to 

 bring away with him interesting and important antiquities, 

 which have either revealed new facts in Egyptian history, 

 or have served to illustrate and explain processes in the 

 technical arts known to the Egyptians. In the early 

 years of this century, when the scientific staff attached to 

 Napoleon's expedition to Egypt was compiling the ma- 

 terials for the splendid map of Egfypt afterwards edited 

 by Jacotin, it was noticed that the " ruins of a large 

 town " existed at Tell el-Amarna, and it is said that a 

 superficial search made over this part of the country re- 

 sulted in the finding of a number of fine objects which have 

 since filtered into several European collections of Egyptian 

 antiquities. But whatever things have been dug out from 

 these ruins, or from the ground round about them, or how- 

 ever great their importance, nothing possessing the histori- 

 cal and scientific value of the antiquities discovered by 

 the Tell el-Amarna woman in 1888 hath ever rewarded 

 searcher before. The exact details of her search will 

 never be known, neither can the exact spot where she 

 made her great discovery be identified (for the Arabs took 

 ■care to obliterate all traces of the diggings made by them 

 on the spot after her "find"), but it is certain that in a 

 small chamber at no great depth below the surface, she 

 found a number of clay tablets the like of which had never 

 been before dug up in Egypt. The number of these tab- 

 lets and fragments is variously given, but it seems that 

 the outside limit may be set at three hundred and thirty ; 

 in this matter, however, and indeed in making any state- 

 ment which is based upon the word of many sellers of 

 *' anticas " in Egypt, the writer (and the reader) must pro- 

 tect himself by saying after the manner of the pious Mu- 

 hammedan, " But God knoweth." Of this " find " the 

 Trustees of the British Museum secured eighty-two tablets, 

 the Gizeh Museum in Egypt about sixty, and the Berhn 

 Museum about one hundred and sixty pieces, of which a 

 large number are fragments which give no connected 

 sense. The authorities of this last institution published 

 ■the texts from their own collection together with those 

 NO. I 177. VOL. 46] 



from the tablets at Gizeh by lithography under the editor- 

 ship of Drs. Abel and Winckler, but the results already 

 gleaned by scholars from this edition appear to be meagre 

 when compared with the quantity of material which the 

 originals offer for study. 



The Tell el-Amarna tablets are different from all other 

 known cuneiform documents. They lack the symmetrical 

 form of the tablets from the libraries of the old Baby- 

 lonian temples, or of those from the library at Kouyunjik, 

 founded by the mighty kings of the last Assyrian Empire 

 — Sargon, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Assurbanipal ; 

 the material is, in many cases, ill-kneaded, and contains 

 fragments of flint or other coarse materials ; the colour 

 of the clay varies from a light to a dark dusk tint, and 

 from a flesh colour to dark brick-red. They are written 

 in a hand which, to some extent, resembles the Neo- 

 Babylonian writing used commonly in Babylonia and 

 Assyria for about seven centuries before Christ. It pos- 

 sesses, however, characteristics different from those of 

 any other style of cuneiform writing of any period now 

 known to exist, and nearly every tablet contains forms of 

 characters which have hitherto been thought peculiar to 

 the Ninevite or Assyrian style of writing. The large, 

 bold hand found upon some of the tablets suggests the 

 work of the unskilled scribe, but more careful examina- 

 tion shows that it is the result of unconventionality rather 

 than ignorance. The details of the peculiarities of 

 spelling need not be discussed here, but the expert will 

 find many rare and important examples of Assyrian 

 orthography never dreamt of before. The Semitic dialect 

 in which the tablets are written is very closely related to 

 the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and the " Canaanite " 

 forms of pronouns, &c., are of peculiar interest for the 

 student of the Bible, for many of them are new, and they 

 afford the means of explaining certain difficulties which 

 now exist in Semitic grammar. Although these tablets 

 offer a satisfactory solution of some difficulties, they raise 

 many questions which will probably remain unanswered 

 for some time, and among these there is one, not the 

 least important, of how it happens that a governor of 

 Egypt, who was a vassal, and ruling in Syria, should bear 

 the name of Itagamapairi, which is neither Semitic nor 

 Egyptian ? 



The Tell el-Amarna tablets are unique as an archaeo- 

 logical " find," and they are also unique as a means of 

 weaving together the threads of the histories of two or 

 three of the greatest nations of antiquity at a critical 

 period. As we are able to say, \^ith comparative certainty, 

 that they were all written between the years 1500- 1450 

 B.C., they have an authority possessed by few of the 

 documents coming down from this remote period. They 

 partly fill, moreover, a gap in the history of the dynasties 

 of Mesopotamia and Syria, for although much compara- 

 tively is known concerning the period in which the 

 Assyrian Empire was founded — about B.C. 1800 — and 

 although we have annals of many kings between B.C. 1 320 

 and 620, the history of the period between B.C. 1800 and 

 1320 is almost unknown. 



The Tell el-Amarna tablets in the British Museum con- 

 sist of a series of despatches written from kings of 

 Babylonia, Alashiya, Mitani, Pha^nicia, Syria, and Pales- 

 tine to Amenophjs III., and to his son, Amenophis IV., 

 frequently named Khut-en-aten, or Khu-en-aten, and the 



