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el-amarna
cessful. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire (612–610 B.C.E.),
Elam was incorporated into the greater kingdom of Media;
and after the defeat of Astyages, king of Media, by Cyrus, the
Persian king, it became an integral part of his empire. Cyrus
even called himself “King of Anshan,” thus adopting the ancient
title of the Elamite rulers (see *Cyrus). In the administrative
division of the Persian Empire, Elam became the satrapy
of Uja, Huja, or Huvja (whence Huz, in Middle Persian,
and modern Khuzistan). Susa was rebuilt with magnificent
palaces, and became a capital city of the Persian monarchs,
second only to Persepolis. The Elamite language continued as
the second language after Persian and equal with Akkadian in
the royal inscriptions of the kings of Persia. The name Elam
was still used in I Maccabees 6:1 (Elymais, ΕλνμαῒϚ, attacked
by Antiochus IV Epiphanes) and by Greek and Roman writers
(Elamitai, Ὲλαμῖται, Acts 2:9).
Language
The Elamite language does not fall into any linguistic group
known today. It can be divided into three strata: (1) Old
Elamite (last quarter of the third millennium B.C.E.); (2) Middle
Elamite (13th–7th cent. B.C.E.), the major stratum; and
(3) Achaemenid Elamite (6th–4th cent. B.C.E.), known mainly
from the bilingual and trilingual inscriptions of the Persian
kings and archival texts from Persepolis.
Achaemenid Elamite was deciphered in the second half
of the 19th century, and since the beginning of the 20th century
great progress has been made in the understanding of Middle
Elamite. Nevertheless, knowledge of the language remains
imperfect; and particularly in the scantily documented older
strata much is still obscure.
Scripts
The most ancient Elamite script is pictographic “proto-
Elamite,” employed at the beginning of the third millennium
B.C.E., which has not yet been deciphered. A linear script
which developed from it in the second half of the third millennium
B.C.E. is still being worked out. During the reign of the
kings of *Akkad (24th–23rd cent. B.C.E.), the ancient scripts of
Elam were superseded by the Mesopotamian cuneiform writing,
which, adapted to the needs of the Elamite language, was
from then on the only one in which it was written.
In the Bible
Elam, located at the edge of the eastern border of the biblical
world, is mentioned only a few times in the Bible. In the
“Table of Nations” Elam is listed with the sons of Shem (Gen.
10:22; I Chron. 1:17), since from a geographic point of view it
was apparently considered part of the Mesopotamian world.
The odd narrative of Genesis 14 mentions *Chedorlaomer,
king of Elam – sometimes identified with Kutir-Nahhunte
(around 1750 B.C.E. or the later one around 1200) – as head of
an alliance with two other kings, those of Shinar and Goiim,
meaning probably Babylonia and the Hittites.
In the “Prophecies Against the Nations” in Isaiah and Jeremiah,
Elam is mentioned, together with Media, as one of the
“Peoples of the North” who would destroy Babylon (Isa. 21:2;
Jer. 25:25). The only prophecy that may be related directly to
a specific event in the history of Elam is Jeremiah 49:34–39,
perhaps about Nebuchadnezzar’s encounter with Elam in his
ninth year (596/5 B.C.E.). According to Ezra 4:9–10, Elamites
were deported to Northern Israel in the aftermath of the Assyrian
king Assurbanipal’s victory in the 640s, and thus constituted
part of the peoples Jews later regarded as Samaritan
non-Jews. In Isaiah 11:11 Elam is seen as a place of exile,
in Ezekiel 32:24 as a typical foreign nation, and in Dan 8:2
as a site of a vision. Elam also appears as a personal name
among returnees from exile, but also as a clan of Benjamin
in I Chronicles 8:24.
Bibliography: W. Hinz, The Lost World of Elam (1973); M.
Stolper and E. Carter, Elam. Surveys of Political History and Archaeology
(1984); R. Zadok, The Elamite Onomasticon (1984); L. De Meyer,
H. Gasche (eds.), Mésopotamie et Elam (1991); F. Vallat, in: ABD II,
424–29; G. Gragg, “Elamite,” in: J. Sasson (ed.), CANE 4, 2162–67; F.
Vallat, “ELAM: haltamti/Elamtu,” in: N.A.B.U. (1996), 89; R. Henrickson,
“Elamites,” in: E. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology
in the Near East 2 (1997), 228–34.
[Hayim Tadmor / Daniel C. Snell (2nd ed.)]
EL-AMARNA, modern name of the site of Akhetaton, the
capital city of Egypt, founded by Amenophis-Amenḥotep
IV (*Akhenaton), the “heretical” pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty
(14th cent. B.C.E.). On this site was discovered the El-Amar na
archive.
El-Amarna Letters
The El-Amarna Letters comprise a collection of cuneiform
tablets named after al-ʿAmārna, a plain on the east bank of
the Nile about 190 mi. (304 km.) S. of Cairo, in the territory
of the Beni-ʿAmrān, or ʿAmārna, tribe. (Though often referred
to as Tell ʾAmārna, or Tell el-ʿAmārna, the location is not a
tell, or mound.) Amarna was the site of the Egyptian capital,
Akhetaton, for about 15 years around the middle of the 14th
century B.C.E.; here, in 1887, through the chance discovery
of a peasant, a part of the diplomatic correspondence in the
royal archives was unearthed. The clandestine explorations
of the natives which followed, and the later scientific excavations
(1889–92, 1912–14, 1921–22, 1926–36), yielded about 355
letters – some might be better classified as lists (of gifts) – besides
more than 20 other cuneiform documents (scribal exercises,
vocabularies, mythological and epical texts). The entire
Amarna (cuneiform) corpus numbers 379 tablets. Though incomplete
and lacking nos. 359–379, the standard edition, with
transliteration of the cuneiform and a German translation,
remains that of the Norwegian scholar J.A. Knudtzon, Die el-
Amarna Tafeln (1915 = EA; for nos. 359–379 and other translations,
see bibl.). An authoritative annotated French translation
by W. Moran appeared in 1987 followed by a revised English
version by the same author in 1992.
With only three exceptions (EA 24, Hur 32, Hittite), the
letters are all written in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the ancient
Near East in the second millennium B.C.E. In general,
284 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6