Pod Insights Empire: World History 362. Ancient Egypt: Great Kings of The Bronze Age (Ep 1) About this episode **Unlock the entire Ancient Egypt series early and ad-free by joining the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com**
You’ve heard of Tutankhamun, but what do you know about the world he grew up in? In this series, we explore the Amarna Revolution, when Tutankhamun’s father instigated the biggest religious revolution the world had ever seen. Who were the individuals at the centre of the movement: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun?
What are the Amarna Letters and how do they reveal the intricate lives of the kings of the Late Bronze Age? Who was Pharaoh Amenhotep III? What was the status of Ancient Egypt on the eve of the revolution?
Anita and William are joined by the brilliant Eric Cline, author of Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of The Amarna Letters and The Bronze Age World They Revealed, to discuss the revelations of these insightful clay tablets.
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1:28 Speaker 02 Edwina Mountbatten died in the jungles of Borneo. The year was 1960, and she was all alone. Well, alone, I say, except she was surrounded by letters. And they weren't letters, as you might think, from her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. No, these were letters from the man that she truly loved. The scourge of the British Empire, the first Prime Minister of a free India. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru. Now, this fascinating love triangle is so pertinent when it comes to pre-partition India politics. And we're going to be delving right in in a mini-series of four
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2:47 Speaker 03 3,400 years ago, an Egyptian pharaoh detonated the most radical religious revolution in human history. His name was Akhenaten.
2:59 Speaker 02 He abandoned 3,000 years of theology, of temples. He moved the capital to a new city that he'd conjured from the bear desert. And then he declared that there was only one god worthy of worship, the sun disc, the Aten.
3:16 Speaker 03 His queen is the most famous face in all of ancient Egypt. Her name was Nefertiti. And his son, a boy of eight or nine, who inherited his father's kingdom, was called Tutankhamun.
3:31 Speaker 02 So look, in this six part series, we're going to be exploring these three famous ancient Egyptians and the extraordinary revolution that lay at the centre of their world. And Empire Club members, you can get the whole of this series early. You can get it ad free as well as exclusive extra episodes. So just join the link in the description because honestly, trust me, this is not one to miss.
3:55 Speaker 03 And we begin today with the world that Akhenaten was about to shatter. Because one of the things that makes this revolution so extraordinary and so violent in its cultural implications is how magnificent and how stable the world before it seemed to be. Egypt's treasury overflowed with Nubian gold. Its armies were undefeated. Its pharaoh corresponded as a brother with the other mighty rulers of the age. And we know all of this in intimate, extraordinary detail because of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 19th century, which we will be discussing today.
4:39 Speaker 02 So hello and welcome to Empire. I'm Anita Aron and
4:43 Speaker 03 And I'm William Derimpel. And our guest today needs no introduction, although we will of course now introduce him because he is one of our very, very favorite historians and archaeologists whose previous appearance produced an audience that we've never had for an ancient series ever before. The great Eric Klein, welcome back.
5:05 Speaker 04 Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back.
5:08 Speaker 03 And we're bringing him back to Empire now with his latest book, which I have just finished today. Love, War and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed. Welcome back, Eric.
5:24 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thank you.
5:25 Speaker 02 Do you know what, Eric? I mean, when he says there was a huge response, literally tidal waves of adulation. And I was trying to think of what your groupies might be called. And I was thinking the tiny Kleinies. I mean, there's also, there's also a great deal of worship for your ties. And can you just tell us what you've come armed with today?
5:44 Speaker 03 Eric's ties. Eric has a whole, has a whole Instagram site dedicated to his ties, which you should now go and check out.
5:50 Speaker 02 Can I ask that scholarly question that you expect from, from me? What you wearing? Can you just describe it? What you wearing today?
5:58 Speaker 04 Well, especially for you guys, I put on my favorite Egyptian tie. It's generic, but pretty much looks like Egypt.
6:07 Speaker 04 And I like this tie so much. This is actually the third iteration. I wore out the first two. I'm not kidding. So this, I finally found another one somewhere on the internet and this is now the third. So special for you.
6:23 Speaker 02 Well, listen, you know, we feel special, but we also, I feel the tiny Kleinies out there know what to get you for Christmas now. All I would say is brace, brace Klein, brace, because I think there are loads coming your way.
6:37 Speaker 04 Okay, great.
6:38 Speaker 02 Let's start with the Amarna letters and the date of the discovery of those letters. We're talking 1887, yes?
6:47 Speaker 04 Yes, we're talking 1887, but I must caution, the wonderful story you have just told.
6:54 Speaker 03 May not be true.
6:58 Speaker 04 Seriously, that is the story. That's what we're told. This woman searching for fertilizer ran across this trove of ancient clay tablets. But the woman could never be located afterward. And I think that she might have been a cover story concocted by.
7:18 Speaker 03 For a bunch of tomb robbers.
7:20 Speaker 04 Well, one, I think one antiquities dealer who found them and then is the main guy distributing them. So I think that was a cover story that was made up.
7:30 Speaker 02 Hang on a minute, Klein. One second. Just before we burn the story down, let me set it up for you because the story, I mean, is the one that I knew, which I find utterly charming, that somewhere about halfway between Cairo and Luxor, there is this unnamed woman filling her basket with stuff, hard baked, she's going to take them home, she's going to crush them up and use them as fertilizer. And then, I mean, this is after god knows how many she's pulverized, she realizes that actually, this is one of the most important historical documents man will ever find. I wrote this down because I've known this story for such a long time. I wrote it down. I wish I knew who said it. How many she had pulverized and grown into leeks and cucumbers and melons will never be known.
8:16 Speaker 03 When did you write that down?
8:18 Speaker 02 I don't know, it's a long time ago. Because I was really into, like, every school child, very much into Egyptology to a very shallow degree. But I just did think, actually, you know, we live in a day where leaks destroy important documents. This is, this is like a protein leak story.
8:34 Speaker 03 We have to say, actually, that I think all three of this have been totally obsessed with this story as a child. Eric, you, I know, have very much had this as a childhood thing. And you and Anita obviously have your school notebooks.
8:46 Speaker 02 I, I, I went through my little notebooks and my really terrible drawings of Nephertiti and Tutankhamun, which will never be seen in public. But Eric, so look, I really loved that story. Tell me why you don't, why you're doing, why are you doing that face, Eric? Why are you making that face?
9:02 Speaker 04 Because I hate dashing people's dreams, but I'm also of one with you all because I too went to see the King Tut exhibit when I was back in high school. It would have been for me in Los Angeles, seventy six, seventy seven. My parents actually allowed me to play hooky from high school for that day to go, as you say, queue up to see the death mask. But anyway, this poor lady, she could never be found later. And so I don't think she existed.
9:32 Speaker 03 And people did try and locate her, did they? There were.
9:33 Speaker 04 Well, I don't know how hard they tried, but because by that point, they were more interested in the tablets themselves. But I think the antiquities dealer who then was the main guy hawking these, all the museum people and antiquities dealers, I think he might have made her up. But that bit about pulverizing them for leaks and such is actually not too far from the truth because while they were transporting them down to Luxor and over to Cairo in bags on donkeys, we're told by a couple of the scholars, Budge and Sase, that they, the tablets like slammed against each other and disintegrated.
10:18 Speaker 04 And we may have lost as much as a third of them.
10:23 Speaker 03 God!
10:24 Speaker 02 God.
10:25 Speaker 04 We've still got four hundred, of which about three hundred and eighty are tablets. But that would mean there should have been six hundred, seven hundred originally.
10:34 Speaker 03 And quite a lot of the stories that you tell in this book sort of, you know, are missing their first page or don't have their conclusion. We have one tablet in a group and we don't get the end or the beginning of the story.
10:45 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yes. Some of the letters go over two or three tablets. And yes, we're missing the first one. So the story starts in the middle, as it were.
10:54 Speaker 02 So when you say you think it might be a made up story, are you, and without any kind of legal jeopardy attached to this statement, suggesting that the person who put this story around is actually hiding the fact that these could have been nicked from somewhere that they shouldn't have been nicked from?
11:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. I think it was a local antiquities, Egyptian antiquities dealer. And we actually have a statement from Sace, the Oxford professor of Assyriology, who says he came down in his boat the year before and noticed them excavating at that area, didn't realize at the time what they were going to find. So, yeah, so I do think these were probably illicit excavations, but can't be proven one way or the other now. The upshot is we know that we've got them. But if they had been, you know, done by archaeologists, oh, that would have been good because we're not actually sure where at the site they came from.
11:52 Speaker 04 And, you know, so we're missing the context. We're guessing as to the building that they came from, but there would be so much more, of course.
12:00 Speaker 03 Eric, one of the great pleasures of this book, and one of the reasons that it's such a fascinating read, is that you've done that thing that often novelists do, where you've got sort of two time periods running and you're telling two stories which you go back and forwards from. On one hand, you've got the main story, which is Akhenaten and his father and Nefertiti and Tukun Kama. But you've also got the story of the antiquities dealers, the different scholarly institutions in Berlin and London that are trying to make sense of all these things. We're going to concentrate today on the first story, but can you just sketch for us for a minute the scholarly competition and all the backbiting and the fact that rather humiliatingly
12:43 Speaker 03 that the Brits seem to have made quite a lot of it up and the Germans got it much, much more accurately and their translations were much better.
12:50 Speaker 04 Yes, this is, this is true. So yeah, the subtitle of the book tells it all, the discovery of the Amarna tablets and the world they revealed. So when I first wrote the book, it was in two halves. The first half was on the modern story of the race to translate. And the second half was what did we find out and what was the world like back then? And in reading it over, I realized that was actually fairly boring. And so I split it so that it changes, it changes about every three chapters.
13:22 Speaker 03 And you've done it very well. It reads like one of my favorite novels, Possession. You know, the Antonia Byatt, it's very much in that style with the researchers and then
13:30 Speaker 02 the The Rabelais documents and then falling in love all over the Rabelais documents. Yes, I see what you mean. Yes.
13:35 Speaker 03 Exactly. But tell us about the, about the story. Who was Budge? Who were these, these Germans who were better translators than he was?
13:45 Speaker 04 Okay, so we have two Brits. We've got E. A. Wallace Budge, the Egyptologist
13:51 Speaker 03 Who I knew from, from reading stuff on Kubla Khan and sort of Nestorian monks of Central Asia, he wrote about, didn't he?
13:58 Speaker 04 He did all sorts of things, but he was primarily an Egyptologist and was not particularly liked by his colleagues. Let's just leave it at that. So Budge was on the one hand. On the other, you have Seis, Archibald Henry Seis, best known for his work on the Hittites. And he is a professor of Assyriology at Oxford. So they are the two British scholars that try their hand at deciphering all of these with mixed results, shall we say. Seis in particular. He was looking for.
14:32 Speaker 03 He was quite merciless with Paul Seis in the book.
14:34 Speaker 04 Oh, I know. I was harsh on him. He kept looking for biblical figures. He thought he saw Solomon. He thought he saw David. He didn't see any of those, but he did see Jerusalem.
14:46 Speaker 02 I'm obsessed with Budge, if that's possible to be obsessed with Budge, because his story is just so compelling. I mean, he came from such modest backgrounds, Cornish, son of a single mother, self-taught, self-made, and then becomes Cambridge educated, rises up to be the keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum.
15:04 Speaker 03 His mum was a waitress, wasn't she?
15:06 Speaker 02 She was something very humble, yeah. But when it comes to, let's just leave it at that, he wasn't liked by us. Let's not leave it at that. Let's talk about it. Because there are some downright scurrilous things written about Budge. The way in which he got his hands on antiquities. I mean, there is one, reportedly he dug a hole through a wall of a customs warehouse in Cairo to see some art about.
15:31 Speaker 02 Like. I mean, that's one of the things that I'd heard, and sort of like Indiana Jones with a sack full of swag just sort of makes off to his academic career. I mean, is that the kind of thing that you didn't want to go near?
15:43 Speaker 04 Pretty much, yes. So he was known for acquiring objects any way he could and shipping them back to the British Museum with the approval of the trustees. So, yes, the Amarna letters are one good example.
15:56 Speaker 03 Couldn't happen today, Eric. Couldn't happen today.
15:58 Speaker 04 No, not at all, not at all. But he did say that if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So the Department of Antiquities was aware of the discovery and they were trying to get as many of the tablets as they could. So Budge hurried down to Luxor and met an antiquities dealer, actually two men, that brought a total of about eighty-one tablets to him. And he describes later in his autobiography, reading them by candlelight in a house so that the antiquities department wouldn't see him. And he says, I realized that I saw Amenhotep III and Akhenaten on these, and that they were royal letters. Well.
16:42 Speaker 04 There's no way that happened. I mean, I'm sure he was reading them by candlelight in a darkened house, but his Akkadian, his cuneiform knowledge could not have been good enough that he could read them, sight read them on the spot. He must have done it when he got back to London, but doesn't matter. He realized they were important enough that he bought them on the spot, packed them up into a box, and then smuggled them out of Egypt.
17:08 Speaker 02 We should say, these little tablets that look like riveetobiscus, and if you don't have them in your country, they're sort of like square, brown, unremarkable looking. Well, now, you're saying he couldn't have read them because they weren't written in cuneiform solely, were they? They were also written in a much older language. Just tell us what was written on them.
17:28 Speaker 04 Well, no, they're written using cuneiform, which is the wedge-shaped writing system, and the language they're being written in is not Egyptian hieroglyphics that you might expect, but actually in Akkadian. Akkadian was used over in Mesopotamia, right, Assyria, Babylonia, but it was the diplomatic lingra franca of the day, much like French was in Benjamin Franklin's day. So he was sitting there. Now, he was undoubtedly trained to a certain extent in how to read cuneiform and Akkadian, but it had really only been deciphered 30 years earlier. There was a very famous contest where they gave the same
18:09 Speaker 04 newly discovered inscription to four scholars and had them independently translated, and it worked. So, I mean, but you would have had to have books with you and all that. I just don't believe.
18:23 Speaker 02 Just a liar, pants on fire. He spends, I mean, he did the work. He did the work, just not at candlelight and not immediately, you know, having a light bulb over his head. Now, we should say, I mean, the reason these Amarna tablets are so important is because they sort of turn upside down our understanding of the ancient world. Tell us why they were so important and what they changed about our view.
18:45 Speaker 04 So they were incredibly important. In fact, Saez at one point said that they were the most important things that we knew. About the ancient Near East at that time, apart from the Bible, right? So, and indeed, they did shed light. But the light was really only shed when the German scholars came into play. There are five of them, they're all young, they all live in Berlin, so I called them the young Berliners. Some of them might be known to some of your listeners. Hugo Winkler, for example, is the man who discovered the capital city of Hattusa and the archives there. But he doesn't do that until 1906.
19:25 Speaker 04 So, a good 20 years earlier, he's one of these young Berliners who are working on these Amarna letters. They are the ones that said it's Amenhotep III, it's Akhenaten, it's the middle of the 14th century B.C. And these are letters to and from the other great kings, as well as petty vassal kings.
19:47 Speaker 03 And there's also a Norwegian that you highlight, who produces this first major scholarly edition. Jorgen Alexander Knudsen, is that the right pronunciation?
19:56 Speaker 04 That is correct, he comes into the picture a little bit later. Our two Brits and five Germans are the ones mainly responsible, and they have everything translated, published, open access, within a decade. By 1896, they're out and available, including in English.
20:16 Speaker 03 That's quick.
20:17 Speaker 04 Yes, but Knudsen is the man that pulls them all together, because the main ones are in Cairo, London, and Berlin. And Knudsen, 1907 and 1915, two volumes, he puts them all out. But you had to be able to read German in that case, because they all are in German.
20:37 Speaker 02 But the thing that is, I suppose, revolutionary about them is that the way we understood the ancient world is that there were separate civilizations, all doing their own thing, all speeding at their own pace. But after these tablets were discovered, we see an interconnected world of communication, commerce, and, you know, quite sophisticated, where things aren't separate at all.
21:01 Speaker 04 That's right, what these tablets revealed was an interconnected. Globalized Mediterranean, if you will, across from basically, you know, Italy over to Iran in modern terms and from Turkey down to Egypt. These particular tablets are only dealing with the Near East. It's Egypt's connections. But it did show that the Late Bronze Age was interconnected. It was the high points before everything collapsed. So what Akhenaten is gonna do is inherit an international world that his father and even predecessors had set up.
21:41 Speaker 04 I mean, we really, we have to go back to Hatshepsut and Thutmose III in the 15th century to find out exactly what happened with Amenhotep III and Akhenaten in the 14th century. So it's all an interconnected world. Egypt was one of the major players because they had control of the gold.
22:02 Speaker 03 And we should say that Amenhotep III is the person, when you go to the Rish Museum today, that enormous colossal head that you see as you walk into that gallery with the bulls to your left, that's him. That's our guy. And he is the most sculpted figure in ancient Egypt. He was very keen on having a sculpture too.
22:23 Speaker 04 He did have a lot made, yes. And he was very influential. I mean, he's one of what I call the G8 of the ancient world at that time. So you've got Egypt, you've got the Hittites up in Anatolia, modern day Turkey, you've got the Assyrians and the Babylonians in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, and then you've got the Cypriots as well, though they're a little bit more minor, as all part of the G8. But then you've also got the vassal kings in Canaan, at Megiddo, Hatzor, Jerusalem, Beirut, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, and these are the ones that owe allegiance to Amenhotep III and Akhenaten.
23:07 Speaker 03 And you divide your book into two with those divisions. The great kings, who will describe and talk to each other as brother this, brother that, and they're busy swapping daughters. Or rather, the second division kings, like the Hittites and the Mitanni are busy giving their daughters to Egypt, who are definitely the kind of number one big dog in the scene.
23:28 Speaker 04 Yes.
23:28 Speaker 03 And then the second half of the book is this fascinating world, which is oddly like today, whereby the whole of the Middle East is busy fighting with each other and every single country is busy, every single city-state that seems to be invading each other, this constant warfare, assassinations, assassination attempts, interventions by foreign powers. It all seems very, very familiar.
23:52 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. You know, things don't change. People have been fighting in that area of the world for thousands of years. But I was following what Vinkler and then Knudsen had suggested. They were the first to separate these into the royal great letters. There's about 50 of those between the great kings. And then the letters from the vassal kings, there are about 300 of those. So I was following the rather traditional layout that people have been doing for 100 years.
24:25 Speaker 02 Well, look, we're going to take a break. Join us after the break when we talk about some of the authors of some of these letters and one particular favorite of mine, Ribhada of Biblos, who writes so much, he's told, please stop writing. That's enough already. Join us after the break.
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26:22 Speaker 03 Welcome back. So we are going to follow this system now. We're going to go first to the great kings before we deal with these needy minor monarchs like
26:30 Speaker 02 Emotionally incontinent.
26:34 Speaker 02 Scribes of ancient. Yes, go on. So tell us what the world was like, Willie. I think, I think maybe actually just reminding us of what we were looking at is good.
26:42 Speaker 03 Let's go through the, the big boys. And particularly, there's a very needy king of Babylon, who's grumbling the whole time and, and also understandably wants to know what's happened to his sister who's disappeared into an Egyptian harem and hasn't been seen for 40 years or something. Tell us all that.
26:58 Speaker 04 Yes. So what we have to realize is that the great kings are, are signing diplomatic treaties with each other. And they're, they're interacting at a very high level. They're exchanging gifts. Trade was beneath them, but they gave each other gifts. And in particular, the other kings are always asking Egypt for gold. They're, the, the tablets are full of-
27:19 Speaker 03 That comes up a lot.
27:20 Speaker 04 It does. Gold is like dust in your land. Gold is like dirt in your land. Just give me some. And one king in particular says, if you give me nuggets of gold, I will give you my daughter. And to his credit, Amenhotep III says, what kind of a man are you that would give away your daughter for some nuggets of gold?
27:42 Speaker 03 Interesting that because that is the modern response, but it wasn't, you wouldn't necessarily assume that the pharaoh would respond that way.
27:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. And he then says, but okay. And they-
27:52 Speaker 02 Okay.
27:54 Speaker 04 Yeah. So-
27:55 Speaker 03 I'll take her.
27:56 Speaker 02 You're a terrible father, but yes.
27:59 Speaker 04 So what we have in both Amenhotep III and then Akhenaten's harems, we have a lot of foreign princesses where their father has sent them or their father before them had sent their sisters. So we've got lots of wonderful names. There's Kadashman Enlil of Babylon and then his successor Burna Boryash II. And they both send daughters over, but other people too. Matani sends daughters over. The Artsawa on the western coast of Anatolia, there are negotiations there. So we wind up with quite a few royal princes or princesses.
28:42 Speaker 03 Over many generations.
28:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:44 Speaker 03 And you get sort of whole families relocating. So that, you know, the sisters, the aunties and the grandmothers are all there.
28:50 Speaker 04 Exactly. I think there's at least two generations, if not three in some cases. And yes, we have one example where one of the kings says, you're asking me for my daughter, but has anybody seen my sister? Is she still there? And the Egyptian pharaoh says, we'll send somebody over who can recognize her.
29:11 Speaker 03 Because there's also a thing where the, the, there's a query, isn't there? Because a woman is presented and the ambassador says, that doesn't look like her.
29:19 Speaker 04 Exactly.
29:20 Speaker 02 Oh gosh, what fake Melania, really? Is that what it is? Somebody just parade it, gosh.
29:26 Speaker 04 I suspect that there were so many women in the harem that Amenhotep III wouldn't have been able to pick her out of a lineup. So, yeah. So these are diplomatic treaties, diplomatic marriages. And that's what a lot of these great letters are about, the 50 letters. They are arranging dowries, they're arranging bride price, they're arranging gifts. And some of the kings did not know how far apart they were. There's one king who says to the Egyptian pharaoh, I was sick and you didn't even ask how I was doing. And then I asked your messenger, how far away is Egypt? And he said, it's quite far.
30:09 Speaker 04 So therefore, my brother, you are forgiven for not asking how I was doing.
30:14 Speaker 02 Okay, can we please, please, please, please, please talk about Ribhaddah, who is not a great ruler. He's one of these sort of vassal rulers. But he is, boy, he's a sharer, isn't he, Ribhaddah? Between sixty to seventy letters in this collection are from Ribhaddah himself. And he does write to the point where the pharaoh actually writes back. At one point it says, why do you keep writing to me? Just why?
30:44 Speaker 02 Why are you doing this?
30:46 Speaker 03 Terrible tablet to receive at the far end. You think you're doing so well with your mate.
30:51 Speaker 02 But I mean, some of his stuff is beautiful. And, you know, he writes in beautiful metaphors. I mean, things like, you know, I'm like a bird in a trap. My field is a wife without a husband. And that's, he's talking about hunger and famine and desperation. He writes in pictures. He writes beautifully.
31:08 Speaker 04 He does, but he writes too frequently.
31:11 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, yes, he does.
31:13 Speaker 04 Yes.
31:13 Speaker 03 But he's got a, he's got a reason for writing. I mean, he is being surrounded by enemies. They're coming for him.
31:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:19 Speaker 03 And, and this is important. You slightly defend him in your book, but it is clear that Akhenaten is not replying and not playing, paying as much attention as you should to all these minor vassals.
31:31 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, but some of the things are awful. He's saying in Biblos, he's telling the pharaoh that you've got to do something. People are selling their sons and daughters in Yeremuta for food. You know, they're just swapping their kin because everybody is starving and still nobody comes. It doesn't paint a very good picture of governance from the pharaohs.
31:51 Speaker 04 And for a very long time, scholars thought that Akhenaten was more concerned with his revolutions back in Egypt than he was with maintaining Egypt's empire, if you want to call it that. And so he ignored that, but you'll get into that in the, in future episodes. But Ribhaddah, the thing is, yes, he has a problematic life, especially since he gets exiled from his own city by his brother.
32:18 Speaker 03 His brother?
32:19 Speaker 04 Yes, that's not good. That's not good.
32:22 Speaker 03 Gets locked out of the city.
32:24 Speaker 04 Yes, yes, and his wife and kids are killed when they're sent to another city. So he does have a bad life, but you know, we have 300 of these letters from the vassals. And as you said, fully 60 of them are from Ribhaddah. So that's, that's what a fifth of the letters? I can imagine the pharaoh going again, more from him?
32:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:49 Speaker 02 Why do you keep, I mean, why do you, why do you, why do you alone keep writing to me? He writes back, and those are the ones we, we have. I mean, let's not forget, there may be some that were, you know, on the back of donkeys, reduced to dust.
33:01 Speaker 04 Exactly.
33:01 Speaker 02 Or, you know, sort of grew cucumbers or leeks in the end. I mean, those are just the ones we have our hands on. It wasn't, it wasn't just, you know, sort of the trials and tribulations that were facing him and the people around him that he wrote about, Willie. I mean, he was, he was also bothered about gold, wasn't he?
33:15 Speaker 03 Gold is, is very much a feature of these letters. And, and everyone's complaining, A, that the same things used to come out with each king writing to Egypt. You have got so much gold, you don't know what to do with it. Please send some. Now, this is because the Egyptians controlled gold mines in Nubia. Is it, is that the root of all this?
33:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, they're in control of the mines in, in Nubia and Sudan. But also there's gold in the eastern desert and they're in control of that too. So this is in part why Egypt is a major player in the late Bronze Age. Each of the countries had their own specialties. The copper came from Cyprus, for example, the tin from Central Asia, Afghanistan. Egypt provided the gold.
33:54 Speaker 03 And Lapis lazuli from Badakshan.
33:56 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly. But so Egypt was a major player because of the gold. Yeah. But, um, you know, to be fair.
34:03 Speaker 03 I've had a choice between being rich in copper and rich in gold, I know which I would go for.
34:08 Speaker 04 I just, either way, you're rich. Does it really matter? But poor Ribhaddah, but you know, he's not the only one being attacked. We also know that the king of Jerusalem, Abdiheba, he claims that he was like a ship in the midst of a sea, surrounded by enemies. Biridiya at Megiddo says that he is surrounded by enemies. I mean, all of these vassal kings, they're. I say at one point, they're like kids in a schoolyard, in a daycare. They're all fighting and they're running to daddy, the pharaoh. So and so hit me, so and so kicked me. I mean, they're squabbling.
34:49 Speaker 03 And they're all saying, don't believe so and so. I didn't kick him. Someone else kicked him.
34:52 Speaker 02 But can I just say, I mean, just again, let's just take one moment and pinch ourselves that we have got an insight into these squabbles and complaining and the, you know, the sibling rivalries from the 14th century BCE. I mean, it's just mind blowing from all of these places, you know, sort of ancient Jerusalem, as well as, you know, all these other places that you've talked about. Do you not find that sometimes, Eric, you know, have you held them? Actually, have you held them in your hand, these letters? Have you touched them?
35:21 Speaker 04 No, but I've seen them through the museum glass.
35:24 Speaker 03 I have held them actually. My friend Irving Finkel at the, at the British Museum, who's this wonderful character who looks like he's straight out of a kind of Arthurian epic. He's like some Merlin emerged from some cave with holding Excalibur, except that he holds these, these wonderful tablets. And they're in this incredibly fancy room in the back of the British Museum, where these gorgeous Victorian sort of bookshelves specially built for cuneiform tablets are. And they're all lined up there.
35:52 Speaker 02 But yeah, but 14th century BCE, I mean, when you, when they put them in your hand, did you have to wear gloves and a suit of armor or something? And what did it, I mean, just what did it feel like to touch them?
36:00 Speaker 04 They are pretty amazing. I mean, I've, I've worked with other tablets when I was a graduate student. And yeah, they're absolutely amazing. And you're quite right. I mean, on the one hand, it's kind of funny to make fun of them that they're like kids squabbling. But you're right, it's 3,400 years ago. But in a way, that also brings out the human element. Nothing has changed. The same things that we argue about with families and everything today, they were arguing about back then. They were a dysfunctional family, if you want to put it that way.
36:34 Speaker 03 Eric, these are actually the best evidence we have for what's going on in this troubled region, which the Egyptians call it Canaan. Is that, is that the Egyptian word for the, for the region?
36:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's one of the names. Yeah, Pakana. Yes, it's one of the names for it.
36:50 Speaker 03 And you casually dropped Jerusalem. Will you quickly tell us, sorry, I interrupted you. But would you, would you, to your answer, add what's going on in Jerusalem and who's, who's living there?
37:00 Speaker 04 Yes, so, well, there are Canaanites that are living there. Everybody there is Canaanite at this time. It's several hundred years before the Israelites really get there. And Jerusalem is called Yerushalaym in the tablets. It's got the same name. And our good friend Seis, who thought he had found David and Solomon, which he didn't, he also said he had found Jerusalem. He was correct. He had found it, but he had only found it because the Germans had found it before him. And they had published and said there are five or even six tablets that mention Jerusalem. And then Seis said, "Oh, yes, yes,
37:40 Speaker 04 yes, yes. I said that last April." And, you know, in fact, he had. But anyway, so yes, there's a king named Abdiheba, king of Jerusalem, who is having problems himself.
37:52 Speaker 03 And tell us about the Canaanites just for a second. Who are these guys? These are the indigenous people who are a mixture of all sorts. They don't call themselves Canaanites. They think of themselves as the citizens of individual cities. But they're caught between these great powers. You've got the Assyrians, you've got the Hittites to the north, and then you've got the Egyptians to the south. And this is a kind of no man's land of city-states that are too weak to mount enormous invasions of anywhere, but can only squabble with each other.
38:20 Speaker 04 Exactly. Yes, these are the local indigenous people. They go back to at least 3,000 B.C., if not, you know, before that. And, yeah, they are, as you put it, they are caught between the two powers. In fact, what it looks like from these letters is that, especially up in the north, in what is now northern Syria, the Canaanite vassals are fighting proxy wars on behalf of the Hittites and the Egyptians. It will erupt into open warfare at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274. But at this point, yeah, the Canaanites are just caught between the major powers.
39:00 Speaker 02 Eric, I mean, we're talking about Jerusalem, we're talking about Canaanites, and your brain immediately goes to religion. Let's talk about religion, shall we? Because in ancient Egypt, it was a come-one, come-all for many years. About 1,500 named gods existed in ancient Egypt.
39:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, there were, there were a lot. And then you've got the gods that were over in Canaan as well. You've got a lot of gods and goddesses running around.
39:23 Speaker 03 And they come back and forward, don't they? You've got some Canaanite gods who get taken on by the Egyptians.
39:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. And then you've got the Hittite gods. I mean, everybody's got the gods. In fact, that seems to be one of the continuities that we've got through the Bronze Age collapse is the religion keeps going. But every so often, you get people coming in and upending things like our friend Akhenaten.
39:46 Speaker 03 And so, give us the world that Tiyapen's, how it's completely open. You've got a kind of almost infinite number of gods and two principal sets of gods. You've got the Egyptian set who are being worshipped in Egypt. And then you've got the Canaanite gods that are extended over quite a wide region, all the way from Garret in modern Syria down to Jerusalem.
40:07 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, or are they all accepted as Egyptian gods? You know, just I suppose as a sort of regional variations on these are all Egyptian gods. Is that how it works?
40:15 Speaker 04 No, I think everybody has their own gods. I wouldn't mix and match the Canaanite gods with the Egyptian gods. But for the Canaanites, for example, you've got Baal and you've got El, you know, and these then later make their way into Israelite religion.
40:31 Speaker 03 And Israel.
40:32 Speaker 04 Exactly.
40:33 Speaker 03 El is in the word Israel.
40:34 Speaker 04 Right. So we've got, you know, the Canaanites are going to leave their legacy for sure. But the Egyptians, I would put them separate, but there are lots of gods and goddesses. And in fact, I mean, you've got Atten, as you're talking about, as the disc of the sun, but you've got Ra as the actual sun and so on. But it also looks like all of the changes begin in this period, that is with Amenhotep III, the father. There are some indications that the worship of Atten actually began with him and that Akhenaten may have just picked up on this, but you'll explore that in future episodes.
41:14 Speaker 03 You definitely feel that there is the beginning of the setting of the stage, that you have a narrowing of the number of gods in Amenhotep III's reign?
41:25 Speaker 04 There may be some indications. Some scholars would argue that, exactly. But I also, I would, I would say that a lot of what we see in Akhenaten's reign was begun by his father. And I point to the Amarna archive as a perfect example. The letters begin in Amenhotep III's time, and Akhenaten simply inherits everything, including the relations with these other great kings.
41:53 Speaker 02 Can you tell us a bit more about Amenhotep? Because I mean, I feel like, you know, we are going to talk about Akhenaten a lot. And if anyone has been obsessed with Egyptology, you all know Akhenaten is, you know, this new era of sort of pot-bellied, strange elongated head pharaohs. It sort of changes, so you know, at least the aesthetic. Amenhotep, what was he like? How was he depicted? I mean, just give us a little bit more on his dad.
42:15 Speaker 04 So this is the guy that I've been fixated with for my whole career. Because I actually wrote my master's thesis on Amenhotep III, yes.
42:25 Speaker 03 You started off as an Egyptologist?
42:26 Speaker 04 I did, well, I was doing connections with Greece. And Amenhotep III has a statue base in his mortuary temple, which is over near the Valley of the Kings. And on that statue base, he has a list of Greek names that had never really been seen before, including Mycenae, including Knossos.
42:49 Speaker 03 But no letters from Mycenae or Minos in your collection, unless they were destroyed on the donkey journey?
42:57 Speaker 04 And this is going to be my story, and I'm sticking to it, yes.
43:00 Speaker 02 You stick to it, but also stick to Amenhotep for a minute. Stop derailing. I want to know about your obsession. I want to know about Akhenaten's daddy. So just tell us a little more, come on.
43:10 Speaker 04 So Amenhotep III is this amazing figure. He's both warrior and diplomat. I mean, he really pulls together all the predecessors. And he is in contact with all of these other G8s to begin with. He really is a consummate diplomat. And so I think a lot of what he's doing, including perhaps his connections with the Aegean, are trying to rein in the Hittites, who are growing power under the king who has the best name in the ancient world, Shupiluliuma.
43:47 Speaker 04 I was gonna name one of my kids that, but my wife, my wife objected, I'm not sure why.
43:52 Speaker 02 But your wife loved your children.
43:54 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly. I mean, Shupi Luliuma Klein, it would have had a ring to it, but yeah, but then everybody would have called him Shupi, and we don't want that. So anyway, I think a lot of what Amenhotep III was doing was trying to rein in the growing power of the Hittites. And as we see a couple hundred years later, he was correct in trying to corral them. But so a lot of the dynastic and diplomatic marriages with these other kings, you can actually see that they're in a circle around the Hittites. But he was a traditional king. He kept the traditional gods and goddesses going. He's got the traditional
44:34 Speaker 04 sculpture. As you said, he'd like to have himself portrayed, but always as a youthful young man, even when he's older, he still looks really good and really young. That's one thing that Akhenaten is gonna change.
44:49 Speaker 03 And he's often depicted with his wife. Is it Tae?
44:52 Speaker 04 Tae, Tae, yes. And that is wonderful. It's a love story. Queen Tae and Amenhotep III, she is the daughter of two, maybe even commoners, and they seem to have married for love rather than anything else. He does, of course, take on other wives, including-
45:12 Speaker 03 Hundreds of them.
45:13 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. But she is always referred to as the chief wife. And she really seems to have had a say in things. In fact, one of the letters, I think it's from Tushrata of Metani, which is today would have been Syria, he actually writes directly to Queen Tae, saying, "Your husband has died. Your son is now on the throne." And that would be Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. He says, "You are the connecting thread, so I am writing to you as the important one." And Tushrata knew which way his bread was buttered, because she was the correct one to write to.
45:53 Speaker 03 And we know her face. It's quite distinctive, isn't it?
45:55 Speaker 04 Yes.
45:55 Speaker 03 She looks quite newbie. It's quite dark.
45:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, very interesting. But to my mind, though, one of the more interesting questions is what you've already referred to. In the Amarna archives, there are no letters from Mycenae, no letters from Knossos, nothing from the Aegean. And if I'm right about the connections between Greece and Egypt at the time, there should have been letters, but there aren't. So maybe they got slammed together on donkey back. But, you know, there is also a story of one of the antiquities dealers stepping either onto or off of a train. And a very large tablet that he had
46:33 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
46:34 Speaker 04 Put into his pocket, fell out and shattered on the platform. That's actually how the Department of Antiquities came to know about these tablets. And this was a tablet that was like a half a meter high. You can't hide it. So I actually think I know it's one of two that are that big. It has to be it. But I do wonder if one of the letters from like the king of Mycenae, you know, was ground to dust. And, you know, we only have two from the king of Assyria. We should have had many more from Assyria. It's not that far away. So I think a lot of what we would have really been even more interested in has gone.
47:17 Speaker 02 I mean, you say that Akhenaten carries on the traditions of his father, that, you know, actually what he does is he, it's like a relay race and he picks up a baton. Why does it feel like it's such a new era? I mean, quite apart from moving religions, which we'll get on to in a bit. Why does he feel like sort of an art or portrayal, aesthetic? He's always, and I should explain, because if you haven't seen this, you know, you've got this, you know, the elongated skull of Akhenaten, the drooping belly, the wide hips, you know, sort of spindly arms. He almost looks like our depictions of aliens in, you know, science fiction now. So unlike the depictions of his father. Was that his idea, solely his idea?
48:01 Speaker 02 And just talk us through the thinking of why that relay race suddenly seems to break?
48:05 Speaker 04 It does seem to be his idea, or somebody's idea, in his reign. We've got realism, if you will. This is what he looked like, or supposedly. The thing is, and you mentioned aliens, you're quite right. The whole family looks like aliens. Even Nefertiti, when you take off the blue crown of Egypt, she's got an elongated skull. All of their kids have elongated skulls. You know, when I show my students the pictures of the drawings that they've got of the inscriptions, they all kind of look, oh my word, those two look like aliens. So there's no way. They're not aliens, and aliens didn't build the pyramids and all that.
48:45 Speaker 02 I have seen, again, this is sort of in the depths of a younger obsession, that there are medical conditions which would lead to that kind of bone structure. There are two sort of physical conditions that would lead to that kind of body. One's Marfan syndrome. Then there's Froelich syndrome, which would also give you these sort of elongated arms and that strangely shaped head. Do you think these are realistic and they are giving us a medical history by accident, or not?
49:09 Speaker 04 I think it's conceivable, yes. Marfan's especially has been suggested for Akhenaten. So that's a definite possibility.
49:17 Speaker 02 Wow.
49:18 Speaker 04 But, you know, it's also been suggested he may have been female and not male.
49:23 Speaker 02 Stop it.
49:23 Speaker 04 Seriously, it's been suggested.
49:25 Speaker 02 I thought that only happened once. That's amazing. So you're saying it could have happened twice?
49:30 Speaker 04 Well, I don't think it actually happened. Look how many kids he has. So it would be a little problematic. But people have tried to explain why he looks that way. I think it's just as interesting to try and explain why he agreed to be depicted that way. I mean, every other Egyptian pharaoh before him was always depicted as a strapping 20-year-old, you know, who could bench press 250 pounds.
49:56 Speaker 02 Beautiful bodies, yeah.
49:58 Speaker 04 Exactly. And he's like, no, this is the way I look, and this is the way everyone else in my family looks. Now, Nefertiti, not a problem. She's absolutely gorgeous. You know, of course you depict her, but not him. So, but there's realism in everything. I mean, even the paintings of ducks. And marshes, those are also realistic at this time. So his revolution is not just in religion. It's all over the place. And I actually think I'm going to give him more credit than maybe some of your other people will. I think he was brilliant. I think it was all deliberate. I don't think it was a religious fanatic working here.
50:40 Speaker 04 I think he was a skillful diplomat because in changing the religion of Egypt to only have Aten and you couldn't worship Aten directly, it was through Akhenaten.
50:53 Speaker 02 So Aten being this, we should clarify, is this disk of the sun.
50:56 Speaker 04 Right.
50:56 Speaker 02 Is the Aten, it's just one. And sometimes you see it depicted as a gold disk alone, or sometimes a gold disk with these fingers coming out which end in anks.
51:03 Speaker 04 Right.
51:04 Speaker 02 Uh, but it is, you know, the, the sun is everything, one single figure.
51:08 Speaker 04 Right.
51:08 Speaker 02 Yes.
51:08 Speaker 04 And caressing the family, yes, absolutely. But, you know, he was already the head of the government. He was already the head of the military. Now, in doing what he does, he's now the head of the religion. There is nothing he doesn't control and enclosing.
51:23 Speaker 03 This is sounding horribly like Trump.
51:24 Speaker 04 Oh, please don't go there, but yes. Uh, but also enclosing the temples, he took all of their treasuries. He, you know, became a multi-billionaire overnight, not that he wasn't already wealthy.
51:37 Speaker 03 Before we move on to that for the next episode, just paint us a picture of Egypt on the eve of Akhenaten's accession. This is a golden age, isn't it? I mean, this is one of the high points of Egyptian civilization.
51:53 Speaker 04 This is literally the golden age, yes. This is the high point of Egypt. I would actually, I would say it was higher than King Tut. King Tut will inherit all of this because he's Akhenaten's son. But I would say Amenhotep III's reign is the culmination. It really started with Hatshepsut, who was an amazing diplomat. It then went to Thutmose III, who was an amazing warrior. And now. A hundred years later, Amenhotep III is both diplomat and warrior. Egypt is at the pinnacle of its success. It controls all the gold. They are in control.
52:34 Speaker 04 And you can see this when the foreign rulers say, will you send me one of your daughters? And he says, absolutely not. That's not how this works. You send me your daughters and I send you whatever I want. So Egypt is in charge.
52:52 Speaker 02 So with that, with Egypt in the preeminent place, why would you want to change everything? Well, join us in the next episode where he changes everything. Absolutely.
53:03 Speaker 04 Upends the whole caboose.
53:05 Speaker 02 It's all going so terribly well. Let's rip it up and start again. But you'll have to wait for that next episode. If you're one of those people who cannot wait for episodes, I don't blame you. Just join our club, empirepoduk.com is where we are, empirepoduk.com. And you get these mini series all in one great glut. So listen to it at your heart's content and without ads. But till the next time we meet, thank you again, Eric Klein. We love having you on. It's just brilliant. Till the next time we meet though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
53:33 Speaker 04 And goodbye from me, William Durrumb.
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