Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age: Rethinking the Canaanite Amarna Letters (The Ancient Word)

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 Medit