B. IN CRITICISM
V. NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY
2. SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION
As Telassar was inhabited by the “children of Eden,” and is mentioned with Gozan, Haran, and Rezeph, in Western Mesopotamia, it has been
suggested that it lay in Bit Adini, “the House of Adinu,” or Betheden, in the same direction, between the Euphrates and the Belikh. A place named Til-Assuri, however, is twice mentioned by Tiglath-pileser IV (Ann., 176;
Slab-Inscr., II, 23), and from these passages it would seem to have lain near enough to the Assyrian border to be annexed. The king states that he made there holy sacrifices to Merodach, whose seat it was. It was inhabited by Babylonians (whose home was the Edinu or “plain”; see EDEN).
Esarhaddon, Sennacherib’s son, who likewise conquered the place, writes the name Til-Asurri, and states that the people of Mihranu called it Pitanu.
Its inhabitants, he says, were people of Barnaku. If this be Bit Burnaki in Elam, extending from the boundary of Rasu (see ROSH), which was ravaged by Sennacherib (Babylonians Chronicles, III, 10 ff), Til-Assuri probably lay near the western border of Elam. Should this identification be the true one, the Hebrew form [telassar] would seem to be more correct than the Assyrian Til-Assuri (-Asurri), which latter may have been due to the popular idea that the second element was the name of the national god Assur. See French Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies? 264.
T. G. Pinches TELEM (1)
<te’-lem> (µl,f, [Telem]; [Te>lem, Telem]): A city in the Negeb “toward
the border of Edom,” belonging to Judah (<061524>Joshua 15:24). In Septuagint
of <100312>2 Samuel 3:12 Abner is said to send messengers to David at Thelam
([qaila>m, Thailam]); this would seem to be the same place and also to be identical with the Telaim and Telam of Saul (see TELAIM). It is probably the same as the Talmia of the Talmud (Neubauer, Geog. du Talmud, 121).
The site has not been recovered.
TELEM (2)
(µl,f, [Telem]; Septuagint Codex Vaticanus [Te>lhm, Telem]; Codex Alexandrinus [Te>llhm, Tellem]): One of three “porters” who had married foreign wives (Ezr 10:24), his name appearing as “Tolbanes” in 1 Esdras 9:25; perhaps the same as TALMON (which see).
TELL See TALE.
TELL EL-AMARNA; TABLETS
<tel-el-a-mar’-na>,
A collection of about 350 inscribed clay tablets from Egypt, but written in the cuneiform writing, being part of the royal archives of Amenophis III and Amenophis IV; kings of the XVIIIth Egyptian Dynasty about 1480 to 1460 BC. Some of the tablets are broken and there is a little uncertainty concerning the exact number of separate letters. 81 are in the British
Museum = BM; 160 in the New Babylonian and Assyrian Museum, Berlin=
B; 60 in the Cairo Museum = C; 20 at Oxford = O; the remainder, 20 or more, are in other museums or in private collections.
I. INTRODUCTION.
1. Name:
The name, Tell el-Armarna, “the hill Amarna,” is the modern name of ancient ruins about midway between Memphis and Luxor in Egypt. The ruins mark the site of the ancient city Khut Aten, which Amenophis IV built in order to escape the predominant influence of the old religion of Egypt represented by the priesthood at Thebes, and to establish a new cult, the worship of Aten, the sun’s disk.
2. Discovery:
In 1887 a peasant woman, digging in the ruins of Tell el-Amarna for the dust of ancient buildings with which to fertilize her garden, found tablets, a portion of the royal archives. She filled her basket with tablets and went home. How many she had already pulverized and grown into leeks and cucumbers and melons will never be known. This time someone’s curiosity
was aroused, and a native dealer secured the tablets. Knowledge of the
“find” reached Chauncey Murch, D.D., an American missionary stationed at Luxor, who, suspecting the importance of the tablets, called the
attention of cuneiform scholars to them. Then began a short but intense and bitter contest between representatives of various museums on the one hand, eager for scientific material, and native dealers, on the other hand, rapacious at the prospect of the fabulous price the curious tablets might bring. The contest resulted in the destruction of some of the tablets by ignorant natives and the final distribution of the remainder and of the broken fragments, as noted at the beginning of this article. (see also Budge, History of Egypt, IV, 186). After the discovery of the tablets the site of the ancient city was excavated by Professor Petrie in 1891-92 (Tell el-Amarna;
compare also Baedeker, Egypt).
3. Physical Character:
The physical character of the tablets is worthy of some notice. They are clay tablets. Nearly all are brick tablets, i.e. rectangular, flat tablets varying in size from 2 X 2 1/2 in. to 3 1/2 X 9 inches, inscribed on both sides and sometimes upon the edges. One tablet is of a convex form (B 1601). The clay used in the tablets also varies much. The tablets of the royal
correspondence from Babylonia and one tablet from Mitanni (B 153) are of fine Babylonian clay. The Syrian and Palestinian correspondence is in one or two instances of clay which was probably imported from Babylonia for correspondence, but for the most part these tablets are upon the clay of the country and they show decided differences among themselves in color and texture: in some instances the clay is sandy and decidedly inferior. A number of tablets have red points, a kind of punctuation for marking the separation into words, probably inserted by the Egyptian translator of the letters at the court of the Pharaoh. These points were for the purpose of assisting in the reading. They do now assist the reading very much. Some tablets also show the hieroglyphic marks which the Egyptian scribe put on them when filing them among the archives. The writing also is varied.
Some of the tablets from Palestine (B 328, 330, 331) are crudely written.
Others of the letters, as in the royal correspondence from Babylonia, are beautifully written. These latter (B 149-52) seem to have been written in a totally different way from the others; those from Western Asia appear to have been written with the stylus held as we commonly hold a pen, but the royal letters from Babylonia were written by turning the point of the stylus
to the left and the other end to the right over the second joint of the first finger.
The results of the discovery of the Tell el-Amarna Letters have been far- reaching, and there are indications of still other benefits which may yet accrue from them. The discovery of them shares with the discovery of the Code of Hammurabi the distinction of the first place among Biblical discoveries of the past half-century.
II. EPIGRAPHICAL VALUE