The Reign of Tudhaliya II and Suppiluliuma I: The Contribution of the Hittite Documentation to a Reconstruction of the Amarna Age.

AuthorBilgin, Tayfun
PositionBook review

The Reign of Tudhaliya II and Suppiluliuma I: The Contribution of the Hittite Documentation to a Reconstruction of the Amarna Age. By BOAZ STAVI. Texte der Hethiter, vol. 31. Heidelberg: UNIVERSITATSVERLAG WINTER, 2015. Pp. xviii + 236. [euro]45 (paper).

Boaz Stavi's new book, which is based on his doctoral dissertation from Tel Aviv University, is an insightfully combined study of the Hittite sources and the Amarna archive in an attempt to bring clarification to the historical events of Anatolia and Syria and establish a better synchronization between the Hittite and Egyptian chronologies.

While "Amarna Age" as a term more specifically refers to the latter half of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt, in a wider sense it also applies to the entire Near East during the mid-fourteenth century BCE on account of the cache of diplomatic correspondence known as the Amarna letters, which reveals invaluable information about international relations among the great powers of the period. The Amarna letters and the period in general have been subject to numerous studies, one of the goals of which was to establish an accurate synchronization in Near Eastern chronology. Stavi's work offers a view into the period from the less-studied Hittite side with a reevaluation of the available documents, bringing alternative interpretations to the discussion with the help of new sources recovered in recent years.

The book is organized into three chapters. The introductory chapter is a discussion of two main sources, the Deeds of Suppiluliuma (DS) and the Amarna letters. About the former the author primarily highlights its fragmentary nature and difficulties associated with the arrangement of the order of fragments. In the lengthier discussion of the Amarna letters, the focus is mainly on identifying the corresponding pharaohs and determining the time frame of the archive, for which he suggests an approximately twenty-five-year period, starting from around the thirtieth year of Amenhotep III until the latest years of Akhenaten's seventeen-year reign, thus ending the archive about five years before the city of Akhetaten was permanently abandoned.

For his purposes, Stavi divides the letters of the archive into three chronological groups: Time Frames I, II, and III, to which he frequently refers in the later chapters while trying to establish synchronization of chronologies. The two events dividing these time frames are Akhenaten's accession and the conquest of Sumur by...

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