From the taḫamunzu to Horemheb: Egypt and Ḫatti in the Age of Akhenaten

Český egyptologický ústav FF UK si Vás dovoluje pozvat na přednášku prof. Evy von Dassow (University of Minneapolis, Dept. of Classical and Near Eastern Studies) nazvanou „From the taḫamunzu to Horemheb: Egypt and Ḫatti in the Age of Akhenaten“ a věnovanou vybraným aspektům egyptsko-chetitských vztahů v závěru 14. stol. př. n. l.

 

Abstrakt:

In the mid-14th century, the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten built a new city, Akhetaten, and relocated his administration there.  This included Egypt’s foreign office, which handled correspondence with the kingdom’s Levantine vassals as well as its great-power peers, from Babylon to Ḫatti.  Since they wrote on clay, a substantial part of Pharaoh’s mail remained to be found when Tell el-Amarna, the site of Akhetaten, was discovered in the modern period.  At last, almost two millennia after the invention of writing, the archaeological record had coughed up a corpus of texts yielding direct synchronisms between Egypt and the Near East!  If only the Amarna letters bore dates … 
But they generally don’t, nor do they necessarily name the kings they refer to, and many contemporaneous sources likewise omit the data we want.  The abundant Hittite archives notably fail to record chronological information; more disconcertingly, members of the Egyptian royal house began changing their names, and even their gender, as Dynasty 18 petered out.  Thus reconstructing the skeleton of history – affixing names to dates and linking them securely to each other – remains a puzzle of interlocking uncertainties.  One new piece of that puzzle is a composition being progressively assembled from numerous fragments that recounts interactions between the Hittite king Mursili II and an Egyptian potentate named Armâ, whose identification with Horemheb is virtually compulsory.  But does he appear in the Hittite text as general, or as pharaoh?  How many years do we scroll back from his altercation with Mursili to reach the reign of Akhenaten?  Or to reach the moment when the taḫamunzu, the widowed Egyptian queen, wrote to Suppiluliuma to request one of his sons to be her husband … Whose widow was she?
Our quest to establish such elementary facts keeps foundering, like the inquiry Pirandello portrayed in his play Cosi è, se vi pare, against not merely uncertainty but indeterminacy.  This talk explores the pathways along which the evidence leads us.

Podrobnosti události

Začátek události
9.6.2017 14:00 - 16:00
Místo konání
Český egyptologický ústav FF UK, Celetná 20, Praha 1, 4. patro, Místnost C419
Webové stránky
https://cegu.ff.cuni.cz/cs/2017/05/19/pozvanka-na-prednasku-evy-von-dassow/
Organizátor
Český egyptologický ústav FF UK
Typ události
Přednášky
Úvod > Kalendář událostí > Přednášky > From the taḫamunzu to Horemheb: Egypt and Ḫatti in the Age of Akhenaten