Nuzi Texts

Amarna Tablets

Ancient Nuzi is located modern YorghanTepe in northern Iraq

It is a Late Bronze Age town/city belonging to the kingdom of Hurriankingdom.

Nuzi was an agricultural town, which now lie buried under the modern day Iraqi city of Kirkuk. To the south of Nuzi was Babylon.

The discovery of this ancient Hurrian city has produced the most substantial amount of information concerning the Hurrians.

These tablets were discovered in and around the palace, as well as in residential houses.

The number of tablets is between 6,500 and 7,000 legal, economic, and administrative documents (ca. 1475–1350 B.C.E.)

One quarter of the documents follow the business transactions of a single Nuzifamily.

They shed light on some of the customs found in the Old Testament.

For example, in the case of a childless couple, the wife could locate another wife for the husband.

◦ "If Gilimninu (the wife) will not bear children,Gilimninu shall take a woman of Lulluland as a wife for Shennma (the husband)."

Sarah provided Hagar for Abraham (Genesis 16:3) for the purposes of bearing children. Should the first wife later bear a son, he would rank over a son born to the second wife. Such was the case when Isaac was born (Genesis 21:1-10)

The site of Amarna (commonly known as el-Amarna) is located on the east bank of the Nile River.

The area contains an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the capital city newly–established and built by Akhenaten (king of Egypt, 1352-1336 B.C.).

The name for the city employed by the ancient Egyptians is written as Akhetatenwhich translates literally as "the Horizon of the Aten.”

It is discovered in 1887 by a village woman digging ancient mud-brick for use as fertilizer.

They are an important record of Egypt in the 14th century B.C.

382 tablets are known, but many others were probably destroyed, or may even be a part of unknown private collections. 44 were written by rulers of foreign states not under Egyptian control, e.g. Mitanni, Assyria, Babylonia, and etc.

Others are from Palestine and southern or central Syria, sent by vassal kings

Small Temple of the Aten, Akhetaten

It is written in Akkadian, the Mesopotamian tongue; the international language of that day;

It became the primary source about the Canaanite language during late Bronze Age through the letters sent from Syria and Canaan.

Several detailed studies of the grammars of the various letters have shed light on the prehistory of Hebrew

It gives information about the structure of the city-states ruled by kings who spent much of their time contending their neighbors.

Also, the Amarna Letters discovery is highly important because they refer to the Hebrews (ca. 14th-15th centuries B.C.). They give evidence to the trustworthiness of the book of Judges. The tablets mention a lot about Canaan, the half of Israel to the west of the Jordan. This name "Canaan" has been found in Egyptian inscriptions of the New Kingdom. The king of Babylon used the word Canaan to designate the entire Egyptian province of Canaan when he wrote to Pharaoh: "Canaan is thy land and its kings are thy servants" (El-Amarna 8, 25)

The original name of Jerusalem was Babylonian, Uru-Salim, "the city of Salim," shortened into Salem in Gen 14:18 and in the inscriptions of the Egyptian kings Ramses II and Ramses III. In the Tell el-Amarna Letters (1400 BC), Jerusalem is still known as Uru-Salim, and its king bears a Hittite name, implying that it was at the time in the possession of the Hittites.

The Egyptians had traditionally worshipped a whole pantheon of gods who were represented in human or animal form or as animal-headed humans.

From early periods solar gods such as Re had played an important role in Egyptian state religion because the distant but universal power of the sun fitted well with prevailing ideas of the supreme power of the king both within Egypt and beyond its borders.

Akhenaten raised the Aten (sun god) to the position of 'sole god', represented as a disk with rays of light terminating in hands which reach out to the royal family, sometimes offering the hieroglyphic sign for life.