The Amarna Scholarly Tablets

Book excerpt: The Armana archives include not only letters but also texts relating to the education of scribes in Egypt: syllabaries, lexical lists, literary texts and other educational exercises. Although the recent translation of the letters by William Moran (The Amarna Letters, Johns Hopkins, 1992) has brought our understanding of this important corpus up-to-date, the other texts have not been included in his volume. They have been waiting for renewed study in the context of literary and scholarly peripheral and core Akkadian texts. The original publications are obsolete and many of the texts are poorly copied. This book provides new editions of all the Amarna tablets not included in Moran's volume, i.e. EA 340-361; 368; 372-377; 379-381. Some of these are fragments whose genre is a matter of debate: suggestions for their attribution will be offered. This new edition includes transliterations, translations, a brief commentary, cuneiform copies, and photographs. The introduction provides an overview of the corpus and is intended to serve as an impetus for further research into some of the more difficult issues yet to be examined.