Petrie, William M. Flinders: Syria and Egypt from the Tell el Amarna letters (London, 1898)

INTRODUCTION 3

in many different ways and places; and the
first synopsis of the whole was given in the
second volume of my History of Egypt.
But since then a much larger number have
been published, with a more critical and
definitive text of the whole by Hugo
Winckler, in The Tell el Amarna Letters.
All the summaries of the letters which
I made before have been now revised with
Winckler's translations, and summaries of
all the new ones have been made from those
translations. I have retained the original
references to the older translations, because
Winckler's edition is so extremely bald and
deficient in general information, so purely
a linguistic exercise and not an effective
edition, that the older publications are still
of value for details of place, state, dockets,
&c. But in every case Winckler's number,
W. n., is placed against each summary.

2. With regard to transliteration I have
departed from the system used by Winckler,
not without good reason. The rage for
employing out-of-the-way and little-known
symbols in place of effective letters which are
understood, threatens to place historical and
linguistic works as much outside of the
ordinary reader's pronunciation as a set of