Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

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Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offers a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of the Levant during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE).The book features a summary of the historical and scribal contexts of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets – a corpus of diplomatic letters between Canaanite rulers and Egyptian rulers of the later 18th Dynasty – and provides a synthesis of research on cuneiform scribalism in the Late Bronze Age. It also offers a methodology for the multimodal analysis of Canaanite cuneiform tablets, which can be applied to other ancient corpora. Specifically, the proposed “code-alteration” approach offers a more accurate description of the range of linguistic, orthographic, and marking systems in the Amarna Letters. The book sheds light upon the use of cuneiform script and written Akkadian in diplomatic communications in the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, broadening our understanding of this period which was pivotal to the development of writing, scribal culture, and West Semitic literary traditions.Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age is suitable for scholars of the Late Bronze Age southern Levant and those interested in literacies and scribal practices of the Ancient Near East.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-04-15
Mått174 x 246 x undefined mm
Vikt453 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieAncient Word
Antal sidor912
FörlagTaylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN9781138230507

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Alice Mandell is the William Foxwell Albright Chair of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research investigates the origins, spread, and socially situated uses of writing in the ancient Levant, focusing on the cuneiform and alphabetic scripts in the second and first millennium BCE. Her work on ancient literacy includes peer reviewed articles: “Writing as a Source of Ritual Authority: The High Priest’s Body as a Priestly Text in the Tabernacle Building Story;” “Word Craft in the Ancient Levant: Craft-Literacy as the Intersection of Specialized Knowledge;” and “Reading and Writing Remembrance in Canaan: Early Alphabetic Inscriptions as Multimodal Objects.”

1. Introduction: Writing, Scribes, and Diplomacy in the Southern Levant in the Amarna Age; 2. From Speech Communities to Script Communities: Past Approaches and New Directions in the Study of the Canaanite Amarna Letters; 3. The Canaanite Amarna Letters and the Scribes Who Wrote Them; 4. Approaches to Code-Switching and Related Phenomena in Speech and Writing; 5. Code-Alternation in Canaano-Akkadian, a Multimodal Strategy of Communication; 6. Broad Strokes: The Visual Design of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets; 7. Code-Alternation in EA 286: A Jerusalem Amarna Letter, Written by a Scribe Trained Outside of Canaan; 8. Code-Alternation in EA 147: A “Literary” Letter from Tyre; 9. Code-Alternation as Register Shifting in EA 300 and 378; 10. Code-Alternation in EA 369, an Egyptian-Akkadian Letter; 11. Conclusion: The Canaanite Amarna Letters as Portals into Cuneiform Script Communities.

"This new book by Alice Mandell represents a significant intervention in the study of the Amarna letters. By shifting the focus away from the putative spoken language that may or may not be reflected in these texts onto the scribal practices and strategies that produced them, Mandell charts a new course for future research that deserves the attention of any scholar working on the Late Bronze Age Near East." - Joseph Lam, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill