Amarna Letters

State of Egypt

In the centuries before and during the approximately 200 years that the children of Israel were in Egypt, it was a great empire which exerted its control or influence far beyond its own borders, and also held subject many of the city-states of the Levant as vassals. But from the time of pharaoh Thutmose III, which is when the Exodus had occurred, to the time of Akhenaten not even a hundred years later, Egypt had rather quickly decreased in power to the point where, as the Amarna Letters fully reflect, it would not even care to defend its vassal states in Palestine against the invading Hebrews.[1]

Script

Before the Israelite conquest of Canaan, the Canaanites were using a cunieform script for written communications. One proof of this assertion is found in the Amarna Tablets. These tablets are diplomatic letters from Canaanite kings made to the Egyptian pharaoh. In many of them, the Canaanites were begging for Egyptian assistance to defend against the invading Habiru, Abiru, or Hebrews. The name given these documents by academics comes from the fact that they were discovered in the ground at Tell el Amarna in middle Egypt. They are written in cuneiform and are commonly and appropriately dated to the 14th century BC. But cuneiform writing was not native to the Egyptians, so the Canaanites were not writing in cuneiform for the benefit of the Egyptians. This is one proof among archaeological relics that Canaanites did not use what we know as Hebrew or Phoenician characters in their writing. The writings in Canaan found with Hebrew characters, and the spread of those characters abroad, all belonged to the Israelites. This in turn serves to show that the Phoenicians among the Greeks, the Phoenicians who brought letters to the Greeks, who also predated the Trojan War, were indeed Israelites and not Canaanites.