362. Ancient Egypt: Great Kings of The Bronze Age (Ep 1)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening, sign up to Empire Club to Empire Club to Empire Club to Empire. UK.com. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the Next Grill four burner gas grill on special buy for only$199 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th through May 27th.

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1:44His name was Jawaharlal Nehru. Now, this fascinating love triangle is so pertinent when it comes to pre-partition India politics. And we're going to be delving right in in a mini series, a four-parter for you. And it's only available to members of our club. So if that isn't you, what you need to do is right away, get to empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com. And for the price of a coffee, come join our club. And as if you needed any more incentive, let me tell you, our very special guest is the marvellous Alex von Tunzelman, who is the author of Indian Summer. So what are you waiting for? Come on.

2:353 ,400 years ago, an Egyptian pharaoh detonated the most radical religious revolution in human history. His name was Akhenaten. He abandoned 3 ,000 years of theology, of temples. He moved the capital to a new city that he'd conjured from the bare desert. And then he declared that there was only one God worthy of worship, the sun disk, the Aten. His queen is the most famous face in all of ancient Egypt. Her name was Nefertiti. and his son, a boy of eight or nine who inherited his father's kingdom was called Tutankhamen. So look, in this six-part series, we're going to be exploring these three famous ancient Egyptians and the extraordinary revolution that lay at the center of their world.

3:31And Empire Club members, you can get the whole of this series early. You can get it ad-free as well as exclusive extra episodes. So just join the link in the description because honestly, trust me, this is not one to miss. And we begin today with the world that Akhenaten was about to shatter. Because one of the things that makes this revolution so extraordinary and so violent in its cultural implications is how magnificent and how stable the world before it seemed to be. Egypt's treasury overflowed with Nubian gold. Its armies were undefeated. Its pharaoh corresponded as a brother with the other mighty rulers of the age.

4:14And we know all of this in intimate, extraordinary detail because of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 19th century, which we will be discussing today. So hello and welcome to Empire. I'm Anita Arnon. And I'm William de Rimpel. And our guest today needs no introduction, although we will of course introduce him, because he is one of our very, very favorite historians and archaeologists whose previous appearance produced an audience that we've never had for an ancient series ever before. The great Eric Klein, welcome back. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back. And we bring him back to Empire now with his latest book, which I have just finished today, love, war and diplomacy, the discovery of the Amarna letters and the Bronze Age world they revealed.

5:11Welcome back, Eric. Thank you. Thank you. Do you know what, Eric? I mean, when he says there was a huge response, literally tidal waves of adulation. And I was trying to think of what your groupies might be called. And I was thinking the tiny Kleinies. I mean, there's also a great deal of worship for your ties. And can you just tell us what you've come armed with today? Eric's ties. Eric has a whole Instagram site dedicated to his ties, which you should now go check out. So can I ask that scholarly question that you expect from me? What you're wearing? Can you just describe it? What you're wearing today?

5:46Well, especially for you guys, I put on my favorite Egyptian tie. It's generic, but pretty much looks like Egypt. And I like this tie so much. This is actually the third iteration. I wore out the first two. I'm not kidding. So this, I finally found another one somewhere on the internet, and this is now the third. So special for you. Well, listen, you know, we feel special, but we also, I feel the tiny Kleinies out there know what to get you for Christmas now. You know, all I would say is brace, brace, Klein, brace, because I think there's loads coming your way. Okay, great. Let's start with the Amarna letters.

6:29and the date of the discovery of those letters. We're talking 1887, yes? Yes, we're talking 1887. But I must caution, the wonderful story you have just told... May not be true. It may not be true. Seriously, that is the story. That's what we're told. This woman searching for fertilizer ran across this trove of ancient clay tablets. But the woman could never be located afterward. And I think that she might have been a cover story concocted by... For a bunch of tomb robbers. Well, one. I think one Antiquities dealer who found them and then is the main guy distributing them. So I think that was a cover story that was made up.

7:19Hang on a minute, Klein. One second. Just before we burn the story down, let me set it up for you. because the story, I mean, it's the one that I knew, which I find utterly charming, that somewhere about halfway between Cairo and Luxor, there is this unnamed woman filling her basket with stuff, hard-baked. She's going to take them home. She's going to crush them up and use them as fertilizer. And then, I mean, this is after God knows how many she's pulverized. She realizes that actually this is one of the most important historical documents man will ever find. and I wrote this down because I've known this story for such a long time.

7:55I wrote it down. I wish I knew who said it. How many she had pulverized and grown into leeks and cucumbers and melons will never be known. When did you write that down? I don't know. It was a long time ago because I was really into it like every school child, very much into Egyptology to a very shallow degree. But I just did think actually, you know, we live in a day where leeks destroy important documents. This is like the Prostian leak story. I have to say, actually, that I think all three of us have been totally obsessed with the stories as a childhood. Eric, you, I know, very much had this as a childhood thing.

8:32And you, Anita, obviously have your school notebooks too. I went through all my little notebooks and my really terrible drawings of Nefertiti and Tutankhamen, which will never be seen in public. But Eric, so look, I really loved that story. Tell me why you're doing that face, Eric. Why are you making that face? Because I hate dashing people's dreams. But I'm also of one with you all because I, too, went to see the King Tut exhibit when I was back in high school. It would have been for me in Los Angeles, 76, 77. My parents actually allowed me to play hooky from high school for that day to go, as you say, queue up to see the death mask.

9:14But anyway, this poor lady, she could never be found later. And so I don't think she existed. And people did try and locate her, did they? Well, I don't know how hard they tried, because by that point they were more interested in the tablets themselves. But I think the antiquities dealer, who then was the main guy hawking these to all the museum people and antiquities dealers, I think he might have made her up. But that bit about pulverizing them for leaks and such is actually not too far from the truth, because while they were transporting them down to Luxor and over to Cairo in bags on donkeys, we're told by a couple of the scholars, Baj and Sais, that the tablets like slammed against each other and disintegrated.

10:07And we may have lost as much as a third of them. God. Oh, God. We've still got 400, of which about 380 are tablets, but that would mean there should have been 600, 700 originally. And quite a lot of the stories that you tell in this book are missing their first page or don't have their conclusion. We have one tablet in a group and we don't get the end or the beginning of the story. Absolutely, yes. Some of the letters go over two or three tablets. And yes, we're missing the first one, so the story starts in the middle, as it were. So when you say you think it might be a made-up story, are you, without any kind of legal jeopardy attached to this statement, suggesting that the person who put this story around is actually hiding the fact that these could have been nicked from somewhere that they shouldn't have been nicked from?

10:57Yeah, exactly. I think it was a local antiquities, Egyptian antiquities dealer. And we actually have a statement from Sace, the Oxford professor of suriology, who says he came down in his boat the year before and noticed them excavating at that area, didn't realize at the time what they were going to find. So, yeah. So I do think these were probably illicit excavations, but can't be proven one way or the other now. The upshot is we know that we've got them. But if they had been, you know, done by archaeologists, oh, that would have been good. Because we're not actually sure where at the site they came from.

11:41You know, so we're missing the context. We're guessing as to the building that they came from. But there would be so much more, of course. Eric, one of the great pleasures of this book, and one of the reasons it's such a fascinating read, is that you've done that thing that often novelists do, where you've got sort of two time periods running, and you're telling two stories, which you go back and forwards from. But on one hand, you've got the main story, which is Ack Martin and his father and Nefertiti and Tutankhamen. But you've also got the story of the antiquities dealers, the different scholarly institutions in Berlin and London that are trying to make sense of all these things.

12:20We're going to concentrate today on the first story. But can you just sketch for us for a minute the scholarly competition and all the backbiting? And the fact, rather humiliatingly, the Brits seemed to make quite a lot of it up, and the Germans got it much more accurately, and their translations were much better. Yes, this is true. So, yeah, the subtitle of the book tells it all, the discovery of the Amarna tablets and the world they revealed. So, when I first wrote the book, it was in two halves. The first half was on the modern story of the race to translate, and the second half was what did we find out and what was the world like back then.

12:59And in reading it over, I realized that was actually fairly boring. And so I split it so that it changes about every three chapters. And you've done it very well. It reads like one of my favorite novels, Possession. You know, the Antonia Byatt? It's very much in that style with the researchers. The Rabelais documents and then falling in love all over the Rabelais documents. Yes, I see what you mean. Yes, very good. Exactly. But tell us about the story. Who was Budge? Who were these Germans who were better translators than he was? Okay, so we have two Brits. We've got E.A. Wallace Budge, the Egyptologist.

13:40Who I knew from reading stuff on Kublai Khan and sort of Nestorian monks of Central Asia he wrote about, didn't he? He did all sorts of things, but he was primarily an Egyptologist and was not particularly liked by his colleagues. Let's just leave it at that. So Budge was on the one hand. On the other, you have Sace, Archibald Henry Sace, best known for his work on the Hittites. And he is a professor of Assyriology at Oxford. So they are the two British scholars that try their hand at deciphering all of these with mixed results, shall we say. Sace in particular. Sace was looking for... You're quite merciless with poor Sace in the book.

14:23Oh, I know. I was harsh on him. And he kept looking for biblical figures. He thought he saw Solomon. He thought he saw David. He didn't see any of those, but he did see Jerusalem. I'm obsessed with Budge, if that's possible to be obsessed with Budge, because his story is just so compelling. I mean, he came from such modest backgrounds, Cornish son of a single mother, self-taught, self-made, and then becomes Cambridge educated, rises up to be the keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum. His mom was a waitress, wasn't she? Which was something very humble, yeah. But when it comes to let's just leave it at that, he wasn't liked by his, let's not leave it at that.

15:03Let's talk about it. Because there are some downright scurrilous things written about Budge, the way in which he got his hands on antiquities. I mean, there is one, you know, reportedly he dug a hole through a wall of a customs warehouse in Cairo to seize the master baths. Is that true? I mean, there's one of the things that I'd heard and sort of like Indiana Jones with a sack full of swag just sort of makes off to his academic career. I mean, is that the kind of thing that you didn't want to go near? Pretty much, yes. So he was known for acquiring objects any way he could and shipping them back to the British Museum with the approval of the trustees.

15:42So, yes, the Amarna letter is one good example. Couldn't happen today, Eric. Couldn't happen today. No, not at all, not at all. But he did say that if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So the Department of Antiquities was aware of the discovery, and they were trying to get as many of the tablets as they could. So Budge hurried down to Luxor and met an antiquities dealer, actually two men, that brought a total of about 81 tablets to him. And he describes later in his autobiography reading them by candlelight in a house so that the antiquities department wouldn't see him. And he says, I realized that I saw Amenhotep III and Akhenaten on these, and they were royal letters.

16:29Well, there's no way that happened. I mean, I'm sure he was reading them by candlelight in a darkened house. But his Acadian, his cuneiform knowledge could not have been good enough that he could read them, sight read them on the spot. He must have done it when he got back to London. But it doesn't matter. He realized they were important enough that he bought them on the spot, packed them up into a box, and then smuggled them out of Egypt. We should say these little tablets that look like riveta biscuits, and if you don't have them in your country, they're sort of like square, brown, unremarkable looking.

17:06Now, you're saying he couldn't have read them because they weren't written in cuneiform solely, were they? They were also written in a much older language. Just tell us what was written on them. Well, no, they're written using cuneiform, which is the wedge-shaped writing system. And the language they're being written in is not Egyptian hieroglyphics that you might expect, but actually in Akkadian. Akkadian was used over in Mesopotamia, right? Assyria, Babylonia. But it was the diplomatic lingua franca of the day, much like French was in Benjamin Franklin's day. So he was sitting there. Now, he was undoubtedly trained to a certain extent in how to read cuneiform and Akkadian, but it had really only been deciphered 30 years earlier.

17:54There was a very famous contest where they gave the same newly discovered inscription to four scholars and had them independently translated. And it worked. So, I mean, but you would have had to have books with you and all that. I just don't believe. You're just a liar, pants on fire. I mean, he did the work. He did the work, just not at candlelight and not immediately, you know, having a light bulb over his head. Now, we should say, I mean, the reason these Amarna tablets are so important is because they sort of turn upside down our understanding of the ancient world. Tell us why they were so important and what they changed about our view.

18:34So they were incredibly important. In fact, Sace at one point said that they were the most important things that we knew about the ancient Near East at that time. apart from the Bible, right? So, and indeed, they did shed light. But the light was really only shed when the German scholars came into play. There are five of them. They're all young. They all live in Berlin. So I called them the young Berliners. Some of them might be known to some of your listeners. Hugo Winkler, for example, is the man who discovered the capital city of Hattusas and the archives there. But he doesn't do that until 1906.

19:14So a good 20 years earlier, he's one of these young Belinders who are working on these Amarna letters. They are the ones that said it's Amarna III, it's Akhenaten, it's the middle of the 14th century BC. And these are letters to and from the other great kings, as well as petty vassal kings. And there's also a Norwegian that you highlight who produces this first major scholarly edition, Jorgen Alexander Knutzen. Is that the right pronunciation? That is correct. He comes into the picture a little bit later. Our two Brits and five Germans are the ones mainly responsible, and they have everything translated, published, open access within a decade.

20:00By 1896, they're out and available, including in English. That's quick. Yes. But Knudsen is the man that pulls them all together because the main ones are in Cairo, London, and Berlin. And Knudsen, 1907 and 1915, two volumes, he puts them all out. But you had to be able to read German in that case because they all are in German. But the thing that is, I suppose, revolutionary about them is that the way we understood the ancient world is that there were separate civilizations, all doing their own thing, all speeding at their own pace. But after these tablets were discovered, we see an interconnected world of communication, commerce, and, you know, quite sophisticated where things aren't separate at all.

20:49That's right. What these tablets revealed was an interconnected, globalized Mediterranean, if you will, from basically Italy over to Iran in modern terms and from Turkey down to Egypt. These particular tablets are only dealing with the Near East. It's Egypt's connections. But it did show that the Late Bronze Age was interconnected. It was the high points before everything collapsed. So what Akhenaten is going to do is inherit an international world that his father and even predecessors had set up. I mean, we really, we have to go back to Hatshepsut and Thutmose III in the 15th century to find out exactly what happened with Amenhotep III and Akhenaten in the 14th century.

21:43So it's all an interconnected world. Egypt was one of the major players because they had control of the gold. And we should say that Amun-Hobes Hepp III is the person, when you go to the Risch Museum today, that enormous colossal head that you see as you walk into that gallery with the bulls to your left. That's him. That's our guy. And he is the most sculpted figure in ancient Egypt. He was very keen on having a sculpture or two. He did have a lot made, yes. And he was very influential. I mean, he's one of what I call the G8 of the ancient world at that time. So you've got Egypt. You've got the Hittites up in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey.

22:26You've got the Assyrians and the Babylonians in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. And then you've got the Cypriots as well, though they're a little bit more minor, as all part of the G8. But then you've also got the vassal kings in Canaan. at Megiddo, Hazor, Jerusalem, Beirut, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon. And these are the ones that owe allegiance to Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. And you divide your book into two with those divisions. There's the great kings, who will describe and talk to each other as brother this, brother that, and they're busy swapping daughters. Or rather the second division kings, like the Hittites and the Mitanni, are busy giving their daughters to Egypt, who are definitely the kind of number one big dog in the scene.

23:17Yes. And then the second half of the book is this fascinating world, which is oddly like today, whereby the whole of the Middle East is busy fighting with each other. Every single country is busy. Every single city-state seems to be evading each other. There's constant warfare, assassinations, assassination attempts, interventions by foreign powers. It all seems very, very familiar. Yes, absolutely. You know, things don't change. People have been fighting in that area of the world for thousands of years. But I was following what Winkler and then Knudsen had suggested. They were the first to separate these into the royal great letters.

23:59There's about 50 of those between the great kings. And then the letters from the vassal kings, there are about 300 of those. So I was following the rather traditional layout that people have been doing for 100 years. Well, look, we're going to take a break. Join us after the break when we talk about some of the authors of some of these letters. And one particular favorite of mine, Ribhada of Byblos, who writes so much, he's told, please stop writing. Enough already. Join us after the break.

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27:07Welcome back. So we are going to follow this system now. We're going to go first to the great kings before we deal with these needy minor monarchs. It's like Egyptians greening. Emotionally incontinent scribes of ancient. Yes, go on. So tell us what the world was like, Willie. I think maybe actually just reminding us of what we were looking at is good. Let's go through the big boys. Particularly, there's a very needy king of Babylon who's grumbling the whole time and also, understandably, wants to know what's happened to his sister who's disappeared into an Egyptian harem and hasn't been seen for 40 years or something.

27:43Tell us all that. Yes. So what we have to realize is that the great kings are signing diplomatic treaties with each other, and they're interacting at a very high level. They're exchanging gifts. Trade was beneath them, but they gave each other gifts. And in particular, the other kings are always asking Egypt for gold. The tablets are full of— That comes up a lot. It does. Gold is like dust in your land. Gold is like dirt in your land. Just give me some. And one king in particular says, if you give me nuggets of gold, I will give you my daughter. And to his credit, Amenhotep III says, what kind of a man are you that would give away your daughter for some nuggets of gold?

28:28Interesting that, because that is the modern response, but you wouldn't necessarily assume that the pharaoh would respond that way. Yeah, and he then says, but okay. But okay. Yeah. I'll take her. You're a terrible father, but yes, poster immediately. So what we have in both Amenhotep III and then Akhenaten's harems, we have a lot of foreign princesses where their father has sent them or their father before them had sent their sisters. So we've got lots of wonderful names. There's Kadashman Enlil of Babylon and then his successor, Berna Boryash II. And they both send daughters over. But other people, too.