ell el Amarna tablets at once found their way to the
British Museum. Some sixty were left in the museum at Boulak, and about
one hundred and eighty were secured for the Berlin Museum, many of them
tiny fragments, but mostly containing important records. Few have remained
in private hands.

Some alabaster slabs came to light at Tell el Amarna bearing the
hieroglyphic names of King Amenophis IV. and his father, Amenophis III.
These had evidently served as lids to the chests. Some tablets also were
inscribed with notes in hieratic, written in red ink. But in spite of
these exceptions, it was at once recognised that all the documents were
written in Babylonian cuneiform. The reading of the introductory lines on
various tablets served to show that the find consisted of part of the
Egyptian state archives in the times of the two kings Amenophis III. and
IV. Thus the first of the many startling discoveries that were to follow
in such rapid succession was made in the recognition that about 1400 B.C.
the Semitic speech of Babylon served as the language of diplomacy in the
East.

Apart from a few tablets dealing with mythological subjects and written in
Babylonian, and two which contain inventories, all the tablets were
letters. Most of them were from Egyptian officials in Syria and Canaan,
and usually they were addressed to the king. Among them were found many
long letters from Asiatic kings to the Egyptian monarch, and also a few
communications from the Foreign Office of "Pharaoh" himself. We must note,
however, that this title of Egyptian kings, so commonly used in the Old
Testament, is apparently never once employed in the Tell el Amarna
documents. It is interesting to observe how difficulties of the script and
of a language not entirely familiar to most of the scribes were overcome.
Even the learned scribes of the royal "House of the Sun" in Egypt had
obviously their own troubles in the matter, and made use of the Babylonian
mythological texts already mentioned as a means of improving their
fluency. Of this we have evidence in the thin red lines by which, on these
tablets alone, the words have been separated from each other. The
governors and officials must not be classified as educated or uneducated
on the evidence of their letters; all alike employed professional scribes,
of whom one might be skilful and the next a bungler whose communications
must be guessed at rather than read. Occasionally a Babylonian word is
followed