‘Love, War, and Diplomacy’ by Eric H. Cline review

The Amarna ‘letters’ – a collection of around 380 clay tablets – carry one side of the correspondence between the Egyptian pharaohs of the 14th century BC and rulers across the Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, and West Asia. They take their name from Tell el-Amarna, a large, sprawling site that contains the city of Akhetaten, founded by the pharaoh Akhenaten. He established this new capital with his wife Nefertiti, possibly around 1350 BC, to promote exclusive worship of the Aten, the sun disk. After the pharaoh’s death, this sun cult survived only briefly into the reign of his successor, Tutankhamun. The city was quickly abandoned, but knowledge of the site was preserved over the centuries, ready for the boom in Western interest in ancient Egypt that occurred in the late 18th century (particularly after Napoleon’s invasion in 1789), after which a steady flow of objects from sites such as Amarna passed from Egypt to the West. Today most of the letters are in museums in Europe, the US, and Russia. Only 50 remain in Egypt.

Although the ‘Amarna Age’ itself lasted around 30 years – a vanishingly brief episode in Egyptian history – it has had a lasting impact. This is partly because of its distinctive artistic style, which influenced Art Deco. From a scholarly point of view it is the content of the letters that is most significant: they have reshaped modern understanding of the Late Bronze Age.

The circumstances of their discovery in 1887 remain unclear: one account suggests that local farmers unearthed the tablets, mistaking them for bricks. Other versions claim that their value was recognised more quickly, leading to their sale to antiquities dealers in Cairo. Either way, the tablets soon attracted scholarly attention.

The letters are recorded on clay tablets rather than papyrus, the typical Egyptian writing material, and most of them are written in regional forms of Akkadian using cuneiform script. Part of the Semitic language family (which includes Hebrew and Arabic), Akkadian functioned as a diplomatic lingua franca, used by scribes in the Hittite Empire, Babylonia, Assyria, and the Levant. Both the material and the language used surprised scholars as the letters clearly indicate the central position Egypt occupied in the international power system of the time, and it might have been expected that Egyptian conventions would be adopted.

The letters reveal a remarkably interconnected world. Many of them are from Egyptian vassals in the Levant requesting supplies such as grain or lumber, or military or diplomatic aid from the pharaoh. Others record elaborate gift exchanges (gold, furniture, textiles) and a few contain myths and legends. They show that the Egyptian rulers being addressed – either Akhenaten or his father and predecessor Amenhotep III – maintained frequent correspondence not only with their Levantine vassals but also with other major powers such as Babylon, Mitanni, and Hatti, and that Egyptian military campaigns extended as far north as Syria. Goods such as African ivory and Cypriot copper circulated widely, as evident from a letter which accompanied a cargo of the latter from the king of Cyprus requesting the best silver and other items in return. Royal women from regions including Babylonia and Mitanni were exchanged as diplomatic brides. These findings challenged earlier assumptions that Late Bronze Age societies were isolated.

Eric H. Cline’s book is the first to introduce a general audience to the letters in detail rather than exploring them as part of a wider history of the Amarna period. Cline examines selected political events in the southern Levant – today Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Syria – as described in the letters. As no responses from the Egyptian court have ever been found there remains a degree of uncertainty around most of these events. There is of course a significant body of archaeological evidence, but Cline makes only infrequent reference to it. Instead he relies on existing translations of the letters (partially republished in 2025 by Jacob Lauinger and Tyler Yoder), often with sentence-by-sentence citations, making it clear that very little new linguistic, historical, or archaeological research has gone into the book.

Cline then offers a history of the letters’ modern reception, which follows the race to translate them. In his telling, the German scholars, among them Adolf Erman, Carl Bezold, and Hugo Winckler, were less proprietary over ‘their’ material than the British Museum’s E.A. Wallis Budge or the Oxford academic A.H. Sayce. The British tended to hog their tablets and publish them individually, while the Germans worked on a more comprehensive catalogue that would allow comparison of the material. This in itself is fine, but Cline offers little engagement with the conditions that allowed Europeans and Americans to acquire and export the letters at the risk of leaving readers with the impression that dealers, scholars, and museums were able to act with little resistance. Much more could have been said about the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, five years prior to the letters’ discovery, which created the conditions which enabled the mass exodus of ancient artefacts.

The bigger complaint, though, is Cline’s lapse into the sort of Orientalist tropes that have been discredited for decades. His version of ‘the East’ is static and unchanging, and comparisons between the Late Bronze Age and the modern Middle East are used to suggest a continuity in patterns of conflict and petty rivalry as a characteristic of the region. Reading the letters, Cline points out that the areas experiencing conflict today were also troubled in the past. The Canaanite rulers, for example, were always infighting, pleading for assistance from the pharaoh much as ‘bickering children’ would from a parent or authority figure. Perhaps this is true: but presented with no deeper analysis of the modern historical context, his examples appear coincidental and random. We are left with a view of the region as defined by long-term continuity based on evidence that is both partial and ancient.

• Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed
  Eric H. Cline
  Princeton University Press, 272pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Hélène Maloigne is a historian of archaeology.