by PARVEZ MEHMOOD
“Some stories of tragedies of royal families are strikingly similar all over the world; irrespective of dynasties, families, nations or times”
This opening sentence in the letter from the queen of one superpower to the king of the other was surprisingly straightforward. The next lines were intriguing. The queen wanted the foreign king to send one of his sons for her to marry – as she feared but didn’t want to be married to non-royalty. She promised not only to marry the boy, should he be sent, the implication was that by marrying the widow of the dead king, he would also become the king of her vast kingdom. This offer was all the more astonishing as the two kingdoms were often hostile to each other over the control of the area around their shared border in north-west Syria; far from their homelands.
The writer was the queen of Pharaonic Egypt; her husband whose death she had declared was Pharaoh Tutankhamun, whose tomb was famously discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 amid rumours of a ‘curse of the Pharaohs.’ The queen has now been identified as Ankhesenamun; the daughter of Pharaoh Akhenaten (originally named as Amenhotep IV) and Queen Nefertiti. Nefertiti has become well known the world over because of her bust crafted in 1345 BC by the artist Thutmose and found in his workshop. The bust is one of the most copied works of ancient Egyptian art.
The letter incident occurred in 1323 BC, two and a half millennia ago, in what is called the Late Bronze Age. At that time, iron had not been discovered but Bronze was widely used and had been in use for approximately the previous 2,200 years.
In socio-political and economic terms, the Late Bronze Age has some remarkable parallels to the modern era. The correspondence between the rulers of the great powers of the time, as analysed by Bruce Trevor in Letters of the Great Kings of the Ancient Near East. (2003) reveals competitive international trade, defense of regions of interest, geo-strategic maneuvering, power alliances; all traits that are elements of modern international relations. The royal families of these ancient superpowers frequently contracted marriages with each other, which is reminiscent of matrimonial relations between pre-First World War European royal families of Russia, Prussia, Greece, Austria, Holland and England. This world order of that time broke down in 1200-900 BC in what is now called the Late Bronze Age collapse and very interestingly depicted by Eric H. Cline in his book 1177 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014).
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