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

Historian Cline (After 1177 B.C.) recounts in this illuminating study the 1887 discovery of a cache of cuneiform tablets that turned out to be a collection of correspondence between the most powerful rulers of the late Bronze Age. The colorful figure E.A. Wallis Budge, an antiquities dealer with “an outsize personality and a penchant for flouting local regulations,” acquired the cache for the British Museum from an Egyptian “peasant woman” who “uncovered the archive while digging for fertilizer”—a story that, Cline notes, was likely “concocted” to hide Budge’s more illicit activities. The tablets incited a race to decipher them among turn-of-the-century scholars, who were shocked to discover a world much like their own, where “a handful of Great Powers... balanced each other off” before the collapse of Bronze Age society, “much as the changing alliances in nineteenth-century Europe maintained the peace for a century until it was shattered by World War I.” Through his own close reading, Cline sees parallels to the present, including evidence of the city states of Canaan—“Jerusalem, Byblos, Beirut, Tyre, Damascus, and Gaza”—being manipulated via proxy wars by the era’s great powers. Cline persuasively argues that the late Bronze Age—with its precarious interdependence—closely resembled the modern “globalized” world. The result is both a remarkable glimpse into deep history and a savvy examination of an academic discipline’s evolution. (Nov.)