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Updated: June 9, 2025
A plaster-cast of his face, taken immediately after death, was discovered by Prof. Petrie at Tel el-Amarna, and it is the face of a refined and thoughtful theorist, of a philosopher rather than of a king, earnest in his convictions almost to fanaticism. Amenophis IV. undertook no less a task than that of reforming the State religion of Egypt.
The name of the latter country is met with for the first time among the Asiatic conquests of Ramses II. engraved on the base of one of the colossal figures which stand in front of the northern pylon of the temple of Luxor; when the Tel el-Amarna letters were written Moab was included in the Canaanite province of Egypt.
Shechem, however, did not lie in the path of the Mohar, and the reference to its mountain is made parenthetically only. We are therefore carried on to Hazor, which afterwards became a city of Naphtali, and of which we hear in the letters of Tel el-Amarna. From Hazor the road ran northwards to Hamath, the Hamah of to-day. Here the tour of the Mohar comes to an abrupt close.
Among them there was one who had once occupied a very prominent place. This was Ashêrah, the goddess of fertility, whose name is written Asirtu and Asratu in the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. Ashêrah was symbolized by a stem stripped of its branches, or an upright cone of stone, fixed in the ground, and the symbol and the goddess were at times confounded together.
We gather from the letters of Tel el-Amarna that the Babylonians were still intriguing in Canaan in the century before the Exodus, though they acknowledged that it was an Egyptian province and subject to Egyptian laws. But the memory of the power they had once exercised there still survived, and the influence of their culture continued undiminished.
Possibly one of the finest Egyptian representations of an animal is the fresco of a goat in the tomb of Gen-Amen, discovered by Mr. Mond. There is even an attempt here at chiaroscuro, which is unknown to Egyptian art generally, except at Tell el-Amarna. Evidently the Egyptian painters reached the apogee of their art towards the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty.
From the Tel el-Amarna tablets, discovered in Upper Egypt, we know that for 100 years people were corresponding with each other, in the language of Babylonia in cuneiform characters. Libraries existed then, and "Canaan in the Mosaic age, was fully as literary as was Europe in the time of the Renaissance." Ancient Babylonian monuments testify to the existence of an ancient literary culture.
The wall and floor paintings that have been discovered at Tel el-Amarna are marvels of realistic art. Plants and animals and birds are alike represented in them with a spirit and faithfulness to nature which is indeed astonishing. Like the houses of his followers, the palace of the king was adorned with similar frescoes.
Perhaps, however, the discovery which above all others has revolutionised our conceptions of early Oriental history, and reversed the critical judgments which had prevailed in regard to it, was that of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The discovery was made in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna on the eastern bank of the Nile, midway between the modern towns of Minia and Siût.
Etakkama, however, as Etu-gama spells his own name, professed to be a loyal servant of the Egyptian king, and one of the Tel el-Amarna letters is from him. We next hear of Namya-yitsa in Accho or Acre, where he had taken refuge with Suta, or Seti, the Egyptian commissioner. Seti had already been in Jerusalem, and had been inquiring there into the behaviour of Ebed-Tob.
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