Aidan Dodson

So I think what we've got here is a pandemic, which is sort of there's a wave of it comes into Egypt in one direction and then possibly with mutations and so on, then goes back out again and then kills even more people.

Right.

I think the issue here is that there's an area where we have some scholarly debate, as you're probably well aware that we have quite a bit of that, is how far these, because these pleas for assistance all come from one guy, a guy called Rib Addy.

And there's a question whether or not he is symptomatic of Akhenaten's of ignoring pleas for help.

Well, the fact that he is simply somebody who is a tension seeker... A notorious bore of Biblos.

Basically, yeah.

That's the other view that actually...

And all the people who allegedly are the enemies of the king are actually just his local personal enemies.

And he simply wants to use Egyptian forces to put down his local quarrels.

And this is one of those problems when we've just simply got these things.

And also, the problem with the archive is that by its nature, it's only the incoming post.

Exactly.

There's a couple of odd drafts, but nothing to do with Ribadi particularly.

So I think there's an issue here of whether or not this represents another aspect of the decline of what's going on in Egypt.

That he's so worried about plague and whatever, he's not actually helped doing something.

Or alternatively, he's just saying, look, we know this guy just has been whinging for years, we'll just forget about him.

He claims to be.

Pretty much everything.

Yeah.

The question is if we knew what letters may have gone in the other direction.