Eric Cline

Absolutely.

Yes, some of the letters go over two or three tablets.

And yes, we're missing the first one.

So the story starts in the middle, as it were.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it was a local antiquities, Egyptian antiquities dealer.

And we actually have a statement from Sais, the Oxford professor of Assyriology, who says he came down in his boat the year before and noticed them excavating at that area, didn't realize at the time what they were going to find.

So, yeah, so I do think these were probably illicit excavations, but can't be proven one way or the other now.

The upshot is we know that we've got them, but if they had been, you know, done by archaeologists, oh, that would have been good because we're not actually sure where at the site they came from.

You know, so we're missing the context.

We're guessing as to the building that they came from, but there would be so much more, of course.

Yes, this is true.

So, yeah, the subtitle of the book tells it all, the discovery of the Amarna tablets and the world they revealed.

When I first wrote the book, it was in two halves.

The first half was on the modern story of the race to translate.

And the second half was, what did we find out and what was the world like back then?

And in reading it over, I realized that was actually fairly boring.

And so I split it.

So it changes about every three chapters.

Okay, so we have two Brits.