Pre-Islamic History
Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations, edited by Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook. 307 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins Press, 2000. $48.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8018-6199-3

This series of essays examines more than three hundred fourteenth century BCE Akkadian letters sent between Egyptian eighteenth Dynasty Pharaohs and their puppet princes in Canaan. Discovered in 1893 in Egypt, these cuneiform letters constitute our earliest evidence for international diplomacy. The letters are well-known to ancient historians of the Levant, but they have rarely been analyzed by experts on modern political relations and conflict resolution. The nineteen essays in Amarna Diplomacy, by leading international scholars in several fields of ancient and contemporary studies, are the result of a congress held in Bellagio, Italy, in 1996, sponsored by the Rockefeller and Littauer foundations and chaired by the editors.

The essays are grouped according to general categories: 1) The International System, 2) Foreign Policy, 3) Imperial Policy, 4) International Transactions, and 5) Diplomacy. The breadth of the scholarly expertise here is remarkable and certainly sheds new light on an ancient and rather arcane body of texts. Specialists include Assyriologists and other philologians, Egyptologists, ancient Near Eastern historians, anthropologists, historians of law and legal experts, political scientists, and authorities on modern international relations. Oddly enough, there are no Syro-Palestinian archaeologists included here, which is inexplicable in light of the fact that the cuneiform tablets, although found in Egypt, originated as letters from various sites in Late Bronze Age Canaan. And most of the sites—in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel today—have been located and excavated, some quite extensively. We even have a number of the Egyptian-style ‘Governor’s Residencies’ that were almost certainly the chancelleries from which these letters to the Pharaoh were written. In short, theories aside, we actually know a great deal from the archaeological evidence of the Canaanite society and the economy that produced this archive. Is that knowledge of context not relevant to a better understanding of these esoteric texts? Interdisciplinary research is a worthy ideal, but it ought to include the most fundamental disciplines. Once again, it seems, textual experts and modern social theorists tend to regard archaeological data as ‘mute,’ when they really speak volumes.

The caveats not withstanding, many of the essays are refreshing, even when their authors admit to a certain naïveté regarding the ancient world. Noteworthy in my opinion are the chapters on “Realism, Constructivism, and the Amarna Letters” (Rodolfo Ragionieri); Egyptian intelligence (Raymond Cohen); “Reciprocity, Equality, and Status-Anxiety in the Amarna Letters” (Kevin Avurch); “A Social-Psychological analysis of Amarna Diplomacy” (Daniel Druckman and Sedar Güner); and “Diplomatic Signaling in the Amarna Letters” (Christer Jönsson).

William G. Dever
University of Arizona

Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment, by Richard Parkinson. 208 pages, figures, color photographs, appendix, glossary, bibliography, chronology, index. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. $27.50 (Paper) ISBN 0-520-22248-2

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 sparked Egyptology’s tremendous growth in the nineteenth century. One of the most important outcomes for Egyptology was the 1799 discovery by French soldiers of the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering ancient Egypt’s long-dead language. Two hundred years later the British Museum celebrated the momentous discovery with an exhibit, “Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment.” The accompanying text by Assistant Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities and curator of the exhibit, Richard Parkinson, is a reliable introduction to the Rosetta Stone's significance, including a selective, fully illustrated catalogue and impressive color plates. The book's first section involves a historical discussion of the Stone's discovery and decipherment. Here, Parkinson is successful in outlining the nationalistic battle to decipher ancient Egyptian, giving Thomas Young due credit but naming François Champollion as the decoder of the ancient writing system. The second section introduces the philology of ancient Egyptian and its various scripts. This is the most effective and detailed part, showcasing Parkinson's strength in philology. In addition, he reminds the reader of the false Western assumption that the Roman alphabet is the climax of a unilinear linguistic evolution.

Cracking Codes is about more than just the Rosetta Stone, however. The real crux of the book explores the possibilities of ‘reading’ cultures. Parkinson rightly places the Stone in its wider context, explaining the cultural significance of writing in ancient Egypt and contending that writing is itself a cultural artifact. The traditional opposition between philology and archaeology must be abandoned for an approach that considers text as one of several possible ways of understanding the past. In order to read texts effectively we must understand the underlying cultural code, informed by archaeology. Yet, the relationship is mutual: archaeology alone cannot tell the whole story. Cracking the cultural code, however, is a difficult task when the society has been dead for thousands of years. In the final section, Parkinson notes that the cultural code of ancient Egyptian is ultimately un-crackable, for “humanity is itself a complex hieroglyph that cannot be completely deciphered” (p. 178). Finally, the book concludes with a summary of ancient Egyptian's relationship to other writing systems and codes yet to be cracked. Ancient Egyptian is by no means the most important ancient writing system, simply the most famous.

While Parkinson successfully highlights the problems of reading ancient texts, his discussion of the social aspects of writing in ancient Egypt is somewhat limited in comparison to his treatment of philology and the function and types of texts. Questions of the magnitude of literacy and scribal education are only quickly touched upon. Of course, this reflects the paucity of evidence for social analysis, and the consequent traditional emphasis on philology, art history, and political history in Egyptology. Overall, Cracking Codes is a useful introduction to the issues of ancient writing systems. Writing does not exist in a vacuum, a model that can be applied to all cultures in all periods.

Kaila Bussert
Tucson, Arizona