Pharaoh Akhenaten's Clay Tablets

In 1887 in a modern village of Amarna, near the Akhetaten site, a peasant woman was digging for decayed mud-bricks, rich in phosphates, used to fertilize her land, when her hoe hit the first of about 500 pillow-shaped clay tablets written in Akkadian cuneiform script, the common language of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s day. The woman then tied the tablets in cloth, and threw them into baskets which were slung over the back of her beast of burden. The tablets that survived the journey and weren’t ground to powder were sold to a dealer of antiquities some 200 miles away in Cairo. (Reeves 62) These clay tablets, left by movers in their haste to move the capital back to Thebes from Akhetaten around 1330 BCE are known as the Amarna Letters and give us an insight into Akhenaten’s reign and foreign policy. Pharaoh Akhenaten increasingly left the running of the government to his father-in-law, Ay, who was vizier and his brother-in-law, the general, the two most powerful men after the Pharaoh. In the collection were incoming messages from foreign rulers from the Mediterranean to Babylon, which contained Egyptian military outpost, requesting gold and military support to fight off invaders. …show more content…
During the reign of Akhenaten his strong-minded son, he did not tolerate any opposition to his religious zeal. His attempt to break the power of the priesthood of Amun-Ra for political reasons may have refueled old enemies. (Reeves 111) The defacing of every monument of Egypt’s greatest god Amun, for an abstract deity, Aten, who did not appeal to the masses, caused an outpouring of rage because of its attack on their traditions. In his focus to defuse the priest, he neglected the provinces, losing the Egypt territories of Nubia and Syria, which weakened the

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Pharaoh Akhenaten's Clay Tablets

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