Place · royal city & archive · Egypt
Tell el-Amarna
Akhenaten's short-lived capital, whose clay-tablet diplomatic archive of the fourteenth century BCE is the fullest record of Late Bronze Age statecraft — letters in Akkadian between Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites and Mitanni.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.661, 30.896
Worth knowing
The Mitanni letters in the archive belong to a dynasty whose rulers bore Indo-Aryan names and whose treaties elsewhere invoke Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas. It is the earliest datable appearance of Vedic gods anywhere, and it is in Syria, not India.
Connections (1)
- Canonised by textMitanni
The Indo-Aryan names of the Mitanni ruling house are known chiefly from the Amarna letters, where Tushratta writes to Amenhotep III about a marriage alliance. A separate Hittite treaty from Boghazkoy swears by Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas, and a Hittite horse-training manual uses Indo-Aryan numerals. The Rigvedic pantheon appears in Anatolian state archives.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Amarna”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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