Books in Brief

006

The Amarna Letters

Edited and translated by William L. Moran

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992) 448 pp., $68.00

With this monumental achievement, a fresh collation and translation of all the letters in the 14th-century B.C.E. Amarna archive,¹ William L. Moran crowns his career as the unquestioned dean of Amarna studies. This is the English version of Moran’s work, which appeared in a French edition in 1987, just 100 years after the initial discovery of the Amarna tablets by a peasant woman digging at el-Amarna, Egypt, in the ruins of ancient Akhetaton, the capital of the “heretic” king, Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV, 1350–1334 B.C.E.).

BAR readers may be primarily interested in the Amarna tablets as historical documents. Moran’s lucid renderings of all the texts and some of the notes are historical as well as linguistic. It is now possible to reappraise the historical events reflected in this most significant archive.

It must be remembered that the tablets of this “archive” are actually discards. Whether or not they had been deposited in dump pits, like the few examples found by Sir William M. Flinders Petrie during his excavations at el-Amarna, they are documents no longer relevant to the administration of the empire by the Egyptian authorities. When the royal headquarters were being moved away from the city at el-Amarna, during the reign of Tutankhamun, these particular tablets were no longer considered important; they were either thrown away in dump pits or left in the abandoned buildings. This must be kept in mind when evaluating the historical events and their implications.

Early studies of the Amarna tablets led scholars to think that Akhenaten had neglected his empire because of his religious reforms. Closer examination of the texts reveals that this is not true. Undoubtedly there was a time, when the rulership was passing from father (Amenhotep III) to son (Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten), during which certain Levantine rulers tried to gain an advantage over their neighbors so as to present the new pharaoh with a fait accompli. These troublemakers were summarily dealt with, and the closed case files, eventually discarded.

The most notorious troublemaker in southern Canaan was Lab’ayu of Shechem. He enjoyed an alliance with the rulers of Gezer and Gath-Carmel, and he politically subjugated Gath-padalla on the Sharon plain and took several towns in the Plain of Dothan by force (EA^a 250). This put him in a position to threaten Megiddo (EA 244; see “Back to Megiddo,” in this issue). The Egyptians had just recently called home their regular army unit that was usually stationed at Megiddo (EA 244). Possibly this Egyptian troop withdrawal was related to Pharaoh Akhenaten’s need for huge numbers of loyal troops at home, during his overt move against the temples, the great financial institutions of Egypt. To succeed against the religious/financial sector, Akhenaten needed the support of the military. His leading officials all had military rank, and recent researches have shown a surprising affinity between the so called heretic king and the army.² During the period of a year or two when the Egyptian standing army was not present at Megiddo, Lab’ayu, King of Shechem, thought to establish control over the important caravan route from Egypt to Damascus and Babylon via the Sharon and Jezreel plains. However, the pharaoh’s internal conflict with the temple bureaucracies did not hamper the effective administration of the provinces—contrary to the popular notion. The conclusion of the Lab’ayu affair reveals that the Egyptian authorities, including the pharaoh himself, were alert to any threats to the stability of Canaan and that they took appropriate action with alacrity. A warrant was issued for Lab’ayu’s arrest, and the local city rulers were charged with carrying it out. That some of them, such as the ruler of Acco and probably others, wanted Lab’ayu dead is obvious from the final result. The culprit was taken from Megiddo to Hannathon on the way to Acco, where he was to be sent by sea to Egypt. At Hannathon, the captors took a bribe from Lab’ayu and released him (along with Ba’lu-meher from Gath on the Sharon plain). As Lab’ayu made a dash for the mountains of Shechem and safety, the “men of Gina” (probably Jenin, but 008possibly of Megiddo) laid an ambush for him, and he was slain. The ruler of Megiddo claimed innocence (EA 245).

A great deal of attention has been given to the meaning of the term ‘apiru, applied to certain groups of troublemakers in the Amarna period and earlier. Moran’s translations and his recent short article on the subject³ leave no doubt that the ‘apiru were outlaws, renegades from the established feudal society. Often the term means someone who is in open rebellion against Egyptian authority, whether he is a city ruler or a stateless bandit. It is certain that the ‘apiru were never tribesmen and never tribalized. They were not landless peasant farmers fleeing their Canaanite feudal masters, nor were they Bedouin from out of the desert. There is no linguistic, sociological or historical connection whatever between the ‘apiru and the Hebrews (‘ibrim).

On the other hand, what is known about the social and ethnic situation from the Amarna letters (in spite of inevitable gaps) precludes any assumption that the Biblical tribes of Israel were already in the land. That popular belief has no more support in the historical sources today than it did 100 years ago.

Moran’s brief introduction of 27 pages condenses the main information needed by the interested reader, whether experienced scholar or newcomer. The customary philological and historical aspects of the discovery and publication are given, followed by a discussion of the language and the writing (paleography and orthography). The notes and collations made by the late Edmund Gordon were placed at Moran’s disposal, and he frequently refers to them in his notes. The script and the dialects of the various letters are analyzed as only Moran could do it. Bibliographical references can be found in Moran’s copious footnotes.

No living scholar has a better grasp of the Amarna corpus as a whole than does W. L. Moran. Nevertheless, a great deal can still be done to improve the interpretation of these texts by more extensive comparisons in all the Amarna contexts of idioms, syntactic constructions and verb forms.

The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Periods

Edited by Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich

(Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992) 346 pp., $48.00

It is rare to find a scholarly book that you immediately treasure. This volume is one! It can be unequivocally recommended to everyone—scholars, students and lay persons alike—with serious interest in the history and development of the cultures of ancient Israel.

As its title indicates, the book aims to provide a comprehensive study of the architecture of ancient Israel from prehistoric times before 3000 B.C. to the Persian period in the fifth to fourth centuries B.C. By reviewing, in chronological sequence, the various significant architectural types and remnants that have been recovered by excavators in Israel and its immediate environs, the book successfully provides a compilation of a vast body of data that is otherwise widely scattered in archaeological literature.

This 1992 English edition, printed with the support of the Dorot Foundation of New York, translates the original Hebrew text first published in 1987. Its authors include a who’s who of prominent Israeli archaeologists, all of whom were students and associates of the highly respected archaeological stratigrapher and architect Immanuel “Munya” Dunayevsky, in whose memory the volume was prepared and presented. The book opens with a brief essay recounting the life and work of Dunayevsky.

The text continues with a helpful first section on “Materials and Fashions of Construction,” which includes essays on “Building Materials and Architectural Elements” by Ronny Reich and on “Massive Structures” by Ehud Netzer. Section 2, on the “Genesis of Architecture,” begins the historical survey. It provides studies on building activities from prehistoric times through the Neolithic period by Ofer Bar-Yosef, and on the “Domestic Architecture of the Chalcolithic Period” by Josef Porath.

The remainder of the book consists of three more extensive sections on elements of architecture in “The Early and 010Intermediate Bronze Age,” “The Middle and Late Bronze Ages,” and “The Iron Age.” Each of these begins with an essay briefly introducing the culture of the respective period or periods. This is followed, in each section, by a series of topical studies that review the architecture of public buildings, domestic dwellings, fortifications and so on. These sections also include discussions of settlement patterns and of town planning for each era. Within this general outline, however, the volume makes no attempt to be rigidly consistent or completely thorough. Thus, for example, two essays treat temple types from the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age and from the Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age; the study of tomb architecture deals only with structural forms (as opposed to cut-tomb types) and limits its coverage to the Middle and Late Bronze Ages; and the discussion of Persian-period materials also includes later Iron Age Phoenician architectural elements.

As with any volume of this scope, there is of course room to question details and to note exceptions. On page 127, for example, Kempinski sets the width of the Middle Bronze wall at Gezer at 2 meters and its towers at 4 meters, when in fact the wall regularly measures over 3 meters wide, and the towers range in width up to 8 meters at places. This reviewer also finds Amihai Mazar’s dismissal of Yigael Yadin’s comparison between the Hazor Area H temple and the later form of the Solomonic Temple as presented in the Bible a bit too cavalier (see p. 172). But concerns like these are surprisingly rare and are offset a hundredfold by this book’s valuable synthesis of architectural information.

Although not a “coffee table” edition, the volume is quite attractive and is technically very well presented. Appropriate plans, line drawings and photographs, all of good quality, complement the text. The captions to the plans include the plans’ source references, a most useful device. The volume concludes with a glossary of architectural terms, a list of abbreviations for references cited, a list of photo credits and an index of names of sites and geographical regions.

For everyone interested in the archaeology of ancient Israel, this book provides a significant and much needed historical survey of architectural types and remains. In both chronological scope and general purpose, it compares favorably with Ruth Amiran’s summary treatment of the Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land (Massada Press, 1960). I am certain that it will find its place on most readers’ shelves next to that very useful volume as a basic resource.

The Amarna Letters

Edited and translated by William L. Moran

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992) 448 pp., $68.00