Here you will find all the Akkadian letters previously shared on Twitter, as well as new ones, not yet shared!
DISCLAIMER The majority of these letters are not edited by me, but by other Assyriologists, as credited. The copyright lies with the respective scholars/publishers.
Bronze Age Chutzpah – Rib-Ḫadda’s plea for help
Doubtlessly one of the most fascinating corpora of Akkadian attestations is the Tell El-Amarna corpus, containing the strikingly one-sided correspondence of the Pharao’s subjects in the levant to him. Amarna was established as the capital of Pharao Akhenaten; the correspondence attested spans (at most) from the latter periods of his reign up to the fifth…
Clothes make the awīlum
In Old Babylonian schools, if you didn’t wear the newest Prada™ robes but instead cheap hand-me-downs that your mother hardly even gave you, you were considered to be less loved by her. … or so argued the spoiled son of a high official, Iddin-Sîn, who wrote to his mother, Zinû. Poor Iddin-Sîn had to live…
The “Princess, Do Your Homework!” Letter
The letter that started the saga is SAA 16 28, also known as the “Princess, Do Your Homework!” letter. When I first posted in on Twitter, my hope was to popularise letters other than Nanni’s complaint tablet to Ea-nasir. While Ea-nasir remains the most famous recipient of an Akkadian letter in pop culture, the “Princess,…
The Old Babylonian Ice-trade
This letter was sent to our favourite good-for-nothing, Yasmaḫ-Addû, by the vassal king of Carchemish. It shows us that the practice of harvesting ice and exporting it goes back to as early as the 1750s BCE! For context, Carchemish lies in Southern Anatolia, on the western bank of the Euphrates, which flows all the way…
Yasmaḫ-Addû, the “king” of Mari
By the beginning of the 18th century BCE, Yasmaḫ-Addû’s father, Šamši-Addû, had built an empire: The Upper-Mesopotamian empire, to be precise. Famously and throughout history, living in your great father’s shadow is never an easy life. Much harder even when your perfect older brother Išme-Dagan is placed in your family’s ancestral throne of Ekallatum living…
Iris Kamil 