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Updated: October 9, 2025
Here there were schools and teachers for instruction in the foreign language and script, and record-chambers and libraries in which the letters and books of clay could be copied and preserved. Long before the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets we might have gathered from the Old Testament itself that such libraries once existed in Canaan.
It was no wonder that Egypt seemed the land of gold to the Asiatics, and that even the King of Babylon begs this very Pharaoh Amenhetep to send him gold, in one of the letters found at Tell el-Amarna, "for gold is as water in thy land."
Several of the most interesting of the Tel el-Amarna letters were written to the Pharaoh Amenôphis IV. Khu-n-Aten by Ebed-Tob the king of Jerusalem. Not only is the name of Uru-salim or Jerusalem the only one in use, the city itself is already one of the most important fortresses of Canaan. It was the capital of a large district which extended southwards as far as Keilah and Karmel of Judah.
Tomkins is probably right in thinking that the next name, that of Shemnau, must be identified with the Shimron of Josh. xix. 15, where the Septuagint reads Symeon. That this reading is correct is shown by the fact that in the days of Josephus and the Talmud the place was called Simonias, while the modern name is Semûnieh. The tablets of Tel el-Amarna make it Samkhuna.
This is one of the facts which we have learnt from the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. The cuneiform system of writing and the Babylonian language had spread all over Western Asia, and nowhere had they taken deeper root than in Canaan.
The letters of El-Amarna which belong to this period show Syria to have been full of small theocratic states, all pervaded, though now under the power of Egypt, by Babylonian culture, each with a god and a settled worship of its own.
The Pharaoh transferred his capital from Thebes to a new site farther north, now known as Tel el-Amarna, changed his own name to Khu-n-Aten, "the Glory of the Solar Disk," and filled his court with Asiatic officials and the adherents of the new cult. The reaction, however, soon came.
Both, however, are alike represented in Hebrew by Cush, and hence we have not only a Cush who is the brother of Mizrairn, but also another Cush who is the father of Nimrod. The name of the latter takes us back to the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Nahrima, or Naharaim, was the name by which the kingdom of Mitanni was known to its Canaanite and Egyptian neighbours.
No mention is made of Hebron either in the Tel el-Amarna letters or in the Egyptian geographical lists, which are earlier than the rise of the nineteenth dynasty. The town must therefore have existed under some other name, or have been in the hands of a power hostile to Egypt.
We have recovered the names of the sculptor and painter of Seti I's temple at Abydos and that of the sculptor of some of the tombs at Tell el-Amarna, but otherwise very few names of the artists are directly associated with the temples and tombs which they decorated, and of the architects we know little more.
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