Amarna Letter EA 364: Letter of Ayyab
Unknown · Late Bronze Age II, reign of Amenhotep IV Akhenaten, circa 1353 to 1337 BC
A clay tablet nine centimetres high, inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform, the diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age. It is a letter to the pharaoh from Ayyab, a local ruler in the southern Levant whom scholars place at Ashtaroth in the region east of the Sea of Galilee. Look at the small, regular signs pressed into the surface and at the way the text fills both faces of the tablet. Ayyab writes as a loyal vassal, prostrating himself seven and seven times, reporting on the guard he keeps over the king's cities and on the hostility of a neighbouring prince who has attacked his towns.
The tablet is one of the Amarna letters, the royal archive discovered in Egypt in the eighteen eighties at Tell el Amarna, the capital of Akhenaten. The Louvre purchased it in nineteen eighteen, together with the other Amarna letters in this and the neighbouring room. The archive reveals a Canaan of small city states, each ruler accusing his rivals and pleading for soldiers. Ayyab's letter, with its complaints about a raiding neighbour, is a typical page from that correspondence, and a rare glimpse of the lands beyond the Jordan in the fourteenth century BC.
Did You Know? Ayyab's name is the same as the biblical Job, though the two men have nothing in common but the name.
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