Cuneiform Culture and the Ancestors of Hebrew: Rethinking the Canaanite Amarna Letters

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offer a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of the Levant during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE).

The book features a summary of the historical and scribal contexts of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets―a corpus of diplomatic letters between Canaanite and Egyptian rulers of the later 18th Dynasty―and provides a synthesis of research on cuneiform scribalism in the Late Bronze Age. It also offers a methodology for the multimodal analysis of Canaanite cuneiform tablets, which can be applied to other ancient corpora. Specifically, the proposed “code-alternation” approach offers a more accurate description of the range of linguistic, orthographic, and marking systems in the Canaanite Amarna Letters. The book sheds light upon the use of the cuneiform script and written Akkadian in diplomatic communications in the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, broadening our understanding of this period which was pivotal to the development of writing, scribal culture, and West Semitic literary traditions.

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age is suitable for scholars of the Late Bronze Age southern Levant and those interested in literacies and scribal practices of the Ancient Near East.

Alice Mandell is the William Foxwell Albright Chair of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research investigates the origins, spread, and socially situated uses of writing in the ancient Levant, focusing on cuneiform and alphabetic scripts in the second and first millennia BCE. Her work on ancient literacy includes peer-reviewed articles: “Writing as a Source of Ritual Authority: The High Priest’s Body as a Priestly Text in the Tabernacle Building Story”; “Word Craft in the Ancient Levant: Craft-Literacy as the Intersection of Specialized Knowledge”; and “Reading and Writing Remembrance in Canaan: Early Alphabetic Inscriptions as Multimodal Objects.”