The Imperial Gaze in Early Amarna Letters Studies

EMANUEL PFOH

Salzburgo

Congreso; Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting - Salzburg 2022; 2022

SBL

The discovery of the Amarna letters in 1887—in particular their subsequent translation and interpretation—made possible for ancient Near Eastern specialists of the time to shed new light on the socio-political conditions of Syria-Palestine during the Late Bronze Age. In effect, when reviewing the scholarly literature of the period, the internal conflict situations described in the letters allowed researchers to draw a general picture of ancient indigenous political communities which was undoubtedly aligned with the imperial perceptions of non-European peoples current during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. This paper explores the understandings that scholars like P. Dhorme, W.M. F. Petrie and R.A.S. Macalister expressed during the first decades of the twentieth century about Amarna Syro-Palestinian or Canaanite societies while at the same time attending to these scholars’ own views on the contemporary indigenous peoples of the land. It also seeks to contextualize their covert imperial gaze as well as their more overt orientalism within the geopolitical situation in the Middle East in those years. Finally, a critical approach to these old scholarly views may help us reflect on how ancient Near Eastern scholarship shapes knowledge about ancient society (a particular Other who is at the same time a perceived cultural ancestor) and how this produced knowledge is entangled with current politics and ideologies of the time—a century ago and, of course, nowadays.