Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age

Alice Mandell is the William Foxwell Albright Chair of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research investigates the origins, spread, and socially situated uses of writing in the ancient Levant, focusing on cuneiform and alphabetic scripts in the second and first millennia BCE. Her work on ancient literacy includes peer-reviewed articles: “Writing as a Source of Ritual Authority: The High Priest’s Body as a Priestly Text in the Tabernacle Building Story”; “Word Craft in the Ancient Levant: Craft-Literacy as the Intersection of Specialized Knowledge”; and “Reading and Writing Remembrance in Canaan: Early Alphabetic Inscriptions as Multimodal Objects.”

"This new book by Alice Mandell represents a significant intervention in the study of the Amarna letters. By shifting the focus away from the putative spoken language that may or may not be reflected in these texts onto the scribal practices and strategies that produced them, Mandell charts a new course for future research that deserves the attention of any scholar working on the Late Bronze Age Near East." - Joseph Lam, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"With characteristic creativity and theoretical sophistication, Alice Mandell invites readers to look beyond and behind the unusual language of the Amarna letters and to see with new clarity the people who actually wrote them. In so doing, she brings these letters to life in fresh ways and opens the door to crucial historical and linguistic insights." - Andrew Burlingame, Assistant Professor of Hebrew, Wheaton College"Alice Mandell's Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age is a landmark rethinking of what the Amarna letters can tell us about the ancient world. Resisting the long-dominant preoccupation with reconstructing the spoken language behind Canaano-Akkadian, Mandell shifts the analytical frame to the scribes themselves — their material practices, pedagogical networks, embodied expertise, and communicative creativity. The result is a remarkably comprehensive study that brings together New Literacy Studies, Community of Practice frameworks, multimodality theory, and close philological analysis to illuminate Late Bronze Age cuneiform scribalism in the southern Levant with unprecedented depth. Mandell's proposed 'code-alternation' approach offers scholars a precise and flexible tool for analyzing linguistic, orthographic, and extra-linguistic variation in these tablets, and her attention to the diplomatic and sociolinguistic contexts of individual scribes produces a richly differentiated map of Canaanite script communities. This is a book that will reshape how scholars read these tablets and, more broadly, how we think about the relationship between scribal agency, literary tradition, and the making of written culture across the ancient Near East." - Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible, Princeton Theological Seminary

• 1. Introduction: Writing, Scribes, and Diplomacy in the Southern Levant in the Amarna Age; 2. From Speech Communities to Script Communities: Past Approaches and New Directions in the Study of the Canaanite Amarna Letters; 3. The Canaanite Amarna Letters and the Scribes Who Wrote Them; 4. Approaches to Code-Switching and Related Phenomena in Speech and Writing; 5. Code-Alternation in Canaano-Akkadian, a Multimodal Strategy of Communication; 6. Broad Strokes: The Visual Design of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets; 7. Code-Alternation in EA 286: A Jerusalem Amarna Letter, Written by a Scribe Trained Outside of Canaan; 8. Code-Alternation in EA 147: A “Literary” Letter from Tyre; 9. Code-Alternation as Register Shifting in EA 300 and 378; 10. Code-Alternation in EA 369, an Egyptian-Akkadian Letter; 11. Conclusion: The Canaanite Amarna Letters as Portals into Cuneiform Script Communities.