Between 1891 and 1892 Alessandro Barsanti 'discovered' and cleared the king's tomb (although it was probably known to the local population from about 1880).
In 1911 Simon provided the financing of Ludwig Borchardt's excavations at Pharao Akhenaten's city in Amarna, whereafter large parts of the found artefacts including the busts of Nefertiti and Tiye passed into his ownership, according to a – still disputed – 1913 partition treaty with the Egyptian Département des antiquités under Gaston Maspero.
Amarna | Amarna letters | Amarna Period | One of the "Amarna Letters" negotiating a marriage between Amenhotep III |
The letters were found in Upper Egypt at Amarna, the modern name for the Egyptian capital of Akhetaten (el-Amarna), founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s – 1330s BC) during the Eighteenth dynasty of Egypt.
Moran, William L. The Amarna Letters. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 1992.
Much information on Sargon (ca. 2300 BC) would have been available during his time (e.g., a birth legend preserved at El-Amarna and in an Assyrian fragment from 8th century BC, and two Neo-Babylonian fragments), but these were not mentioned.
There is also a record of messages from the pharaoh to Kadashman-Enlil I of Babylon in the Amarna Letter (EA1-5).
Their discoveries include the discovery of a shrine for the god Hathor, a statue of a cow from Deir el-Bahri, the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut and the sculpted model of Nefertiti from Amarna.
In Egypt in 1887 W. M. F. Petrie found painted sherds of Cretan style at Kahun in the Faiyum, and farther up the Nile, at Tell el-Amarna, chanced on bits of no fewer than 800 Aegean vases in 1889.
Hachmann, Rolf., “Kāmid el-Lōz und die Amarna-Zeit oder vom Sinn und Unsinn der Kulturgeschichte und ihrer Erforschung” Saarbrücken 1972.
Tunip is especially mentioned in the Amarna letters of Aziru, residing in Amurru and in conflict with the king of Hatti.