Position in chronology
Amarna Letter EA 153 — Abi-milku of Tyre
Translation · reference
Scholar-verifiedTo the king, my lord, my god, my Sun-god, thus speaks Abi-milku, your servant, the dust at your feet: I fall at the feet of the king, my lord, seven times and seven times …
Source: Moran, The Amarna Letters (1992)
Translation · AI engine
read from photoTo the king, my lord, my god, my sun — thus speaks Abi-milku, your servant: I am the dirt of your feet…
3 uncertain terms ↓
- epir šēpīya — Literally 'dust/dirt of your feet' — a well-known hyperbolic prostration formula in the Amarna letters; 'epir' can also be read as 'eper'; no ambiguity in meaning but the lacuna marker '…' in the transliteration indicates the formula continues (typically 'I fall at the feet of the king seven times and seven times').
- ilīya šamšiya — 'My god, my sun' — standard honorific for the pharaoh in Syro-Palestinian Amarna correspondence; 'šamšiya' (my sun) reflects the Egyptian solar theology projected onto the pharaoh.
- ardūka — 'Your slave/servant' — the expected self-deprecatory term used by vassals; not ambiguous lexically, but its appearance here is truncated in the transliteration provided.
Reasoning ↓
Photo examination: The tablet is a small, roughly rectangular clay tablet in a light buff/tan clay. The surface carries multiple horizontal lines of densely impressed cuneiform wedges across the entire obverse face visible here. The script is consistent with Middle Babylonian (or Late Bronze Age peripheral Babylonian) hand as expected for an Amarna letter. Individual sign clusters are visible — horizontal, vertical, and diagonal wedge groups can be seen in the upper register — but the resolution and lighting angle create enough shadow and surface texture noise that individual signs cannot be confidently read or matched against the transliteration sign by sign. The upper-left area shows what may be the AN sign (god determinative) and signs consistent with šarri/bēliya groupings, but this cannot be verified at this resolution. The transliteration supplied ('ana šarri bēliya ilīya šamšiya / umma Abi-milku ardūka — epir šēpīya') is entirely consistent with the standard epistolary formula of the Amarna letters from Syro-Palestinian vassals, and EA 153 from Abi-milku of Tyre is well-attested in Moran's 1992 corpus (W.L. Moran, 'The Amarna Letters', EA 153, pp. 239–240). The translation follows the standard prostration/salutation formula. Cross-check: Photo broadly consistent with a multi-line Akkadian administrative/epistolary tablet of this period; individual sign-level confirmation not possible from this photograph.
Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · prompt 2026-05-11/v2 · May 11, 2026 · 2489 in / 680 out tokens
Why it matters
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.
Transliteration
ana šarri bēliya ilīya šamšiya / umma Abi-milku ardūka — epir šēpīya …
Scholarly note
Abi-milku, a vassal ruler of Tyre on the Phoenician coast, writes in Akkadian to his Egyptian overlord Akhenaten. The formulaic submission ('dust at your feet, seven and seven times') was the standard salutation across the Late Bronze Age diplomatic system.
Attribution
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (24.2.12), Open Access. source
Translation excerpted from Moran, The Amarna Letters (1992).
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