Diplomacy in Western Asia in the Early Second Millennium B.C.

Until the discovery of the royal archive of Mari belonging to the first half of the eighteenth century B.C., the principal sources for the study of the history of international law and diplomacy in the second millennium B.C. were the diplomatic records of the Egyptian and Hittite empires found at Tell el Amarna and Boǧazköy, covering the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C.; few earlier documents of international character were known. The new evidence, combined with that of contemporary texts from Babylonia and Alalaḫ, proves that many of the rules and principles recognised in the fourteenth century B.C. as governing the relations of civilised states were already established some four centuries earlier.