Indeed, the claim that Akhenaten neglected his kingdom’s
international interests seems to be negated by one of our most
important sources of information about international relations in
the Near East during the fourteenth century. This is the cache of
382 clay tablets accidentally discovered at el-Amarna in 1887, in the
remains of Akhenaten’s short-lived city Akhetaten. Three hundred
and fifty of these documents are letters, or copies of letters,
exchanged by Akhenaten or his father and predecessor Amenhotep
III (whose letters had been preserved and brought to the new city
after his death), with foreign rulers and the pharaoh’s vassal
subjects in Syria-Palestine.^2 As these letters clearly demonstrate, the
pharaoh who was allegedly indifferent to his kingdom’s affairs, and
to maintaining Egypt’sinfluence on the international scene, kept in
close communication with his vassal rulers in the Syro-Palestinian
region and with his foreign peers, just as his father had done.
The pharaoh exchanged both letters and diplomatic missions
with his Royal Brothers in Hatti, Mittani, Babylon andfinally
Assyria. That’s a total of four other Great Kingdoms with which the
pharaoh had dealings. But Mittani was at this time on the way out.
Its empire wasfinally destroyed by another of the pharaoh’s
correspondents, the Hittite king Suppiluliuma, and the upstart
Assyria quickly moved tofill the power vacuum which Mittani’s fall
left in its wake. Indeed we can already see the beginning of its rise in
a letter of bitter complaint to the pharaoh from the Babylonian king
Burnaburiash.^3 Representatives of the Assyrian king had presented
themselves at the pharaoh’s court.‘How dare they!’Burnaburiash
protested.‘The Assyrians are my vassals! They have no authority to
send delegations to you on their own behalf!’But the Assyrians had
been hospitably received by the pharaoh, who no doubt foresaw
that Assyria was on the verge of becoming the next Great Kingdom,
successor of the soon-to-be-extinguished Mittanian empire. The
Babylonian king had good reason to be concerned. For most of the
rest of the Bronze Age, Assyria and Babylon became bitter rivals
and were often locked in conflict.
Yet with few exceptions, and despite the bickering and
complaints with which a lot of the high-level diplomatic exchanges
between the royal courts are laced, the letters and diplomatic
AN ELITE FRATERNITY:THE CLUB OF ROYAL BROTHERS 229