The Amarna letters are a cache of about 380 clay tablets, inscribed in cuneiform, probably forming part of an official diplomatic archive. It preserves correspondence sent from rulers or client-rulers in areas corresponding to modern Syria, Israel and Turkey, with (in some cases) copies of the Egyptians' replies. These letters, sent by rulers of places familiar from the pages of the Old Testament, had quite an impact in the late nineteenth century, especially in England and Germany (160 of the tablets were bought by the Berlin Museum in 1888). The pioneering British archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who excavated at Amarna between November 1891 and March 1892, exploited interest in the letters to give
Figure 3.3 Young Moses reading to Pharaoh's daughter (and Akhenaten?) in an interior with themes taken from Amarna sculpture, from Sunday Readings for the Young, c. 1894. It was intended to be coloured in. The illustration is based on Arthur Reginald's 1894 painting Joseph Interpreting the Pharaoh's Dream.
Amarna an increased public profile. He contributed essays about Amarna to general books approved for Sunday reading by bodies like the Religious Tract Society, such as the Revd S. Manning's The Land of the Pharaohs Drawn with Pen and Pencil (revised edition, 1897). This was a popular Sunday School prize (my own copy was presented to Mildred Braccly at St Andrew's Sunday School, Corleston, in 1905). Petrie's essay in Manning's book discusses how archaeology in Egypt confirmed the Bible's value as a historical document. He regards the Amarna correspondence as so famous that it requires no explanation or discussion, and assumes that readers arc already aware of it, though he goes into details about other aspects of the site. The links between Amarna and the Bible evoked by the letters were debated in all sections of the press, especially when modern-language translations of the tablets soon followed their discovery. These translations were also widely reviewed.17 Here, for instance, is the opinion of the heavyweight Saturday Review (6 August 1892):
When we observe that all that long time ago the hearts of kings were very much as they arc still, and that nations were governed before the time of Moses on principles which do not materially differ from those which still prevail, we are forced to look upon this book as one of the most interesting additions made to the history of mankind in our time.
The Amarna letters were discovered at an interesting moment in the relationship of archaeology to debates about the historicity of the Bible. In the 1880s, the Bible's veracity was still under attack from those who criticised it on the basis of internal literary inconsistencies - the so-called 'higher critics' - as well as from the challenges of Darwinism and geological research. But the Amarna letters, apparently confirming so much of the Old Testament, made archaeology a temporary ally of the opponents of higher criticism and the evolutionists' theories. The comments of a Scottish clergyman, the Revd James Smith, in his travelogue A Pilgrimage to Egypt, arc representative of this interpretation of the letters:
Greatest interest centres round the cuneiform tablets found in 1888. . . . By the discovery and decipherment of them, a crushing blow has been given to those 'higher critics', who confidently asserted that as the art of
writing was unknown in Moses' time, so he could not have written the Pentateuch.''1''
These biblical links ensured that there was a flurry of archaeological activity at Amarna after 1887. Excavators hoped to discover further items from Akhenaten's diplomatic archives, and maybe some other treasures too, perhaps even the tomb of the king himself. Furthermore, the site badly needed archaeological attention. When Flinders Petrie went out there in the winter of 1891, the structures planned by Wilkinson in the 1820s and Lepsius in the 1840s were deteriorating, and antiquities dealers had caused considerable disturbance by raking over promising areas in search of small objects.
Archaeology and tourism at Amarna 1891-1914
Petrie was faced with conflicting demands in his excavation of Amarna. On the one hand were his own priorities of establishing pottery sequences, getting a sense of occupation patterns, surveying and mapping; on the other were the demands of the patrons who financed the work, and wanted in return beautiful artefacts for their personal antiquities collections. Petrie's main backer was William Thysscn-Amhcrst, MP (1835-1909), ennobled as Baron Amherst of Hackney in the same year as the Amarna expedition. Amherst persuaded Petrie to take out his young protege Howard Carter - then aged only 17, and thirty years away from fame as the discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb. Amherst's involvement demonstrates the cultural prestige Amarna had accrued in the few years since the discovery of the letters. It was now an appropriate place for rich amateurs' investment, and they even ventured out to the remote site in person. Sightseeing, knowing where to go, what to see and when to see it, is a form of symbolic capital, so Amarna and the elite were happy bedfellows (see Figure 3.4). Holidaying aristocrats such as the Marquess of Waterford, millionaire Egyptological enthusiasts such as Charles Wilbour, army officers, clergymen, and officials of the British administration in Egypt all stopped off at Amarna in the winter of 1891— 2 in the hope of seeing something beautiful, biblical or unusual. Amarna