Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) · document

Amarna letter: Royal Letter from Ashur-uballit, the king of Assyria, to the king of Egypt

Source of record: Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access) — catalogued by the holding institution. View the original record →

Description

Tablet, Amarna letter. New Kingdom, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten, ca. 1353–1336 B.C. Clay. H. 7.7 cm (3 1/16 in.); W. 5.5 cm (2 3/16 in.). Probably from: Amarna (Akhetaten), Middle Egypt. Credit: Rogers Fund, 1924.

AI image analysis GPT-5.4-nano

Machine-generated from the object's image on Jul 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.

A roughly rectangular, broken tablet of baked clay covered with dense wedge-shaped cuneiform script lines.

The object appears to be a small clay tablet with irregular edges and a curved/uneven surface. The front is filled with tightly packed, horizontal bands of incised wedge-shaped marks consistent with cuneiform writing rather than Egyptian hieroglyphs. No legible royal names, deity names, or cartouches are clearly readable at this resolution; the script is visible throughout the face and wraps only minimally around the edges. There is no separate iconographic scene; the tablet is primarily text-bearing.

hieroglyphic only New Kingdom, Amarna Period (consistent with an Amarna letter; Assyrian cuneiform) fragmentary
Materials baked clay (tablet)
Signs wedge-shaped cuneiform strokes/marks (not legible individual words at this resolution) ×100

Connections

Materials Baked Clay

Cross-references (4)

  • Wikidata-Q Q116247535 tier-1
  • Collection-QID Q160236 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
  • Inventory-Number 24.2.11 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
  • MET-Object 544695 tier-2 (wikidata-mediated)
About this record's data
  • From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Metropolitan Museum of Art — Egyptian Art (Open Access).
  • AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
  • Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
  • Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.