The 2025 CAMS lecture series Connected Histories of the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East continues on March 20!

“Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Period, A View from Canaan”

Professor Alice Mandell (Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract:

The Canaanite Amarna Letters are the largest group of diplomatic letters recovered from Tell el-'Amarna, Egypt. The letters are important because they are the earliest diplomatic letters from the southern Levant. They also offer insight into the political landscape in Canaan in the mid-fourteenth century BCE. Advances in the study of the letters have enabled scholars to identify individual scribes, and to reconstruct regional scribal communities. While the scribes were initially viewed as "peripheral" scribes, who were incompetent in Akkadian, the letters suggest that the scribes used their craft in innovative ways to communicate to the pharaoh and his officials.

Alice Mandell is an assistant professor and the William Foxwell Albright Chair of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on ancient Levantine scripts, written languages, and texts, spanning the second and first millennia BCE. Alice’s book Cuneiform Culture and the Ancestors of Hebrew is forthcoming in Seth Sanders’ series for Routledge: The Ancient Word: New Discoveries in Religion and Language from the Biblical and the Near Eastern World. This work analyses scribal practices in the Canaanite Amarna Letters using sociolinguistic theory and the multimodality perspective. She also has several ongoing projects that examine alphabet-based literacy practices in the ancient Levant. From 2020 to 2021, she was awarded a Getty Research Initiative grant for research on the early alphabet. Her second book project, Alphabetic Word Craft: Levantine Craft Communities and their Literacies, examines the evidence for the literacy practices involved in object making in the second and early first millennia BCE. This project has won two awards: a Johns Hopkins University Catalyst award and a National Endowment for the Humanities award.