Eric H. Cline | Love, War, and Diplomacy in Canaan during the Amarna Age

“Speak to the King, my lord and my Sun god”: Love, War, and Diplomacy in Canaan during the Amarna Age”
Eric H. Cline
January 7, 2026

In 1887, a cache of nearly 400 clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform was discovered at Tell el-Amarna, the capital city of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten. Dating to the fourteenth century BCE, it is the only royal archive that has been discovered from New Kingdom Egypt so far. Within the archive are fifty letters exchanged with the other great powers of the day, including the Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians. However, there are also nearly three hundred letters sent by vassal Canaanite rulers, such as Biridiya, the king of Megiddo; Abdi-Heba, the king of Jerusalem; and Rib-Hadda, the king of Byblos. The letters offer a glimpse into the vibrant diplomatic world of the Late Bronze Age, revealing royal marriages, elaborate negotiations, and exchanges of luxury gifts between the great kings, as well as political maneuvering and appeals from the vassal kings of Canaan, including Biridiya, who sent six letters to the Egyptian pharaohs. They also, however, provide a window through which we can glimpse the competition among antiquities dealers and museums to acquire the tablets; the scholarly race between British and German teams to decipher them; and the colonial-era context in which they were unearthed.

Speaker's Bio

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A two-time Fulbright Scholar, National Geographic Explorer, NEH Public Scholar, Getty Scholar, and member of the Explorers Club, with degrees from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, he is an active field archaeologist with more than thirty seasons of excavation and survey experience in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, including ten seasons at Megiddo (1994-2014), where he served as co-director before retiring from the project in 2014, and another ten seasons at Tel Kabri, where he currently serves as Co-Director. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books and nearly one hundred articles; translations of his books have appeared in twenty-three different languages. He is perhaps best known for "1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed", but also for "Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon", which tells the story of the 1925-1939 University of Chicago excavations at Megiddo, a century after they first began.

Cline’s latest book is "Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed".
https://press.princeton.edu/books/har...

Presented in conjunction with the ISAC Museum special exhibition "Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined", on view September 18, 2025, to March 15, 2026.
https://isac.uchicago.edu/megiddoimag...