Among the most important results of recent Egyptian exploration must be reckoned the discovery of the tablets of Tell Amarna. Tell Amarna is a village in Upper Egypt, and in a pit at the foot of the mountain, at the base of which it stands, were discovered hundreds of these relics, which have since been distributed among the museums of London, Berlin, and Gizeh. The writing on these tablets is cuneiform, and the matter is of profound historic importance, illustrating, as it does, the relations between Egypt and western Asia in the fifteenth century b.c. While the existence of these tablets proves that cuneiform writing was common to Palestine and Syria as well as the Euphrates Valley, yet curiously enough the manuscripts of Tell Amarna are different from any of the same kind that have been found elsewhere, and the language resembles somewhat the Hebrew of the Old Testament.
While most of these tablets are letters and despatches from friendly powers in Syria, and from vassal princes in Palestine, others, contain interesting legends. The letters are addressed to the Pharaohs known as Amenophis III and Amenophis IV, who reigned in the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries b.c.
The Egyptians employed what practically were three alphabets—the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic. The hieroglyph is a symbol, denoting something without letters or syllables; as, pictures of a bee stand for king. The hieratic handwriting was a transition from symbols to primitive letters; the papyrus reed, cut in slices and gummed together, was used as paper for this writing, much of which is very beautifully executed in black and red inks. These papyri are constantly being discovered, but perhaps the earliest “find“ of importance was that at Thebes in 1846, when a number of literary compositions were brought to light which must have been executed during the twelfth dynasty, about twenty-five centuries b.c.
The Egyptian Tales are works written in a lighter vein than the literature we have already described. They will be read with delight, and none the less so because they show that the Egyptians, who are the Chinese of the Mediterranean, possess that saving quality in literary and political life, namely, a sense of humor.
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