Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed – The Past

https://the-past.com/review/books/love-war-and-diplomacy-the-discovery-of-the-amarna-letters-and-the-bronze-age-world-they-revealed/

Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed

Ancient Egypt

April 16, 2026

This article is from Ancient Egypt issue 154

After exploring the Bronze Age Collapse of 1177 BC in his previous two books (reviewed in AE 85 and AE 143), Eric Cline travels back some 200 years to investigate the inter-relationships between the ‘great kings’ and vassal rulers of the Near East through their correspondence: the so-called ‘Amarna Letters’.

Of 382 clay tablets discovered at Amarna in 1887, there are 349 letters between the various ‘actors’ of the time, written in cuneiform text – mostly in the Akkadian language. Rather than providing complete translations of these letters – which appear in other publications – Cline presents an engaging chronological reconstruction of the interactions of the various players: their demands for gold and gifts, marriage negotiations, and, in the case of the petty rulers of Canaan, their intense rivalries – which he compares to the ‘protracted bickering of a large dysfunctional family’.

But this narrative only covers part of the book. Cline also explores the discovery of the letters (and the unfortunate destruction of nearly half of the tablets during their journey to Luxor and Cairo on the back of a donkey). He describes the race to decipher the texts (by Sayce and Budge in Britain, and the ‘Young Berliners’ Erman, Lehmann, and Winckler in Germany) at a time when little was known about this period, and the Akkadian language had been deciphered only three decades earlier.

In a final section, Cline makes some intriguing finds using ‘Social Network Analysis’. He takes all 246 kings and vassal rulers named in the Amarna Letters, and the 464 connections between them, to create a web-like visual display showing who was in contact with whom, and the strength of those relationships. From such diagrams it appears that the Egyptian kings dominated only two out of the ten clusters of relationships, even though the letters analysed were all excavated in Egypt. They also highlight that Akhenaten and the Babylonian king Burna-Buriash II had more contacts in common than they had with anyone else – evidence that the ‘heretic’ pharaoh was more interested in foreign affairs than previously believed.

Cline’s new work is an engaging read and offers a different approach to examining the Amarna Letters, illustrated with maps and portrait sketches, and plenty of references and notes for the serious scholar. And if you are unfamiliar with names such as Eriba-Ada I and Yidya of Ashkelon, the dramatis personae at the back will be indispensable!

REVIEW BY SARAH GRIFFITHS

Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed
by Eric H Cline
Princeton, 2025
ISBN‎978-0-691-27408-9
Hardback, £30

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