This is the Friends of History Debating Society.

I am Guy as Germanicus is here.

Frustrated as we are in the 21st century, we turn to the 13th century BCE.

Bronze Age.

There are seven empires.

The critical ones for our conversation are the Egyptian led by the Pharaoh. There are seven empires.

The critical ones for our conversation are the Egyptian, led by the pharaoh, and the Hittite, led by the king.

In between our subordinate kingdoms, the ones that are of concern to a new book, Love War, Diplomacy,

the discovery of the Armarna letters in the Bronze Age World they revealed by Eric Klein.

I've spoken to the archaeologist several times, Eric Klein,

and this is his new book.

And it leads me to smile.

This is delight in our hearts. What was correspondence without email,

without message, text messages, without meeting in person, what was correspondence like in the 13th century

and 14th century BC? They wrote on tablets, the scribes did at their feet. And they wrote in

cuneiform except for when they wrote in hittite. And sometimes they wrote in hittite in cuneiform.

The hittite would be to the other scribe, a message. And then the cuneiform would be the formal.

And the discovery of these tablets was accidental. It was a pile of tablets that had been, they

looked like bricks, but they had writing on them. There were probably originally 600 of them.

This is the 19th century. But many were broken in the discovery and the transportation.

So it's an incomplete record.

But there's enough of the correspondence to know that it's the Pharaoh,

...