Amarna letters: King Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem Commissions a Syrian Scribe

Letter from King Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem to the Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin The seven Jerusalem-Amarna Letters (EA 285–291) tell us about the local ruler ‘Abdi-Ḫeba, “Servant of Ḫebat,” a Hurrian goddess, and his struggles to keep control of this city.[1] Similarities in the language, orthography, formulae, paleography, and the scribal marks in these letters suggest that they were the work of a single scribe, who was not trained in Canaan. Petrographic analysis, conducted after Moran’s work on this scribe, showed that the clay of letters 286–290 was made from local materials around Jerusalem. Yet two letters...