The Imperial Gaze in the Historiography of Amarna Politics

Abstract

The discovery of the Amarna letters in 1887, and their subsequent translation, 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. 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 conceptions and descriptions that several scholars expressed about Amarnian Syro-Palestinian or Canaanite societies since their discovery until the 1970s. The analysis also attends to these scholars’ own views on the contemporary indigenous peoples of the land, seeking 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, the paper assesses a turning point, instigated by Mario Liverani, in the interpretation of Amarna politics and its relationship with the fading imperialist gaze in the historiography of the region since the 1980s.