Tubu is the town east of the Sea of Galilee

Sea of Galilee

The Sea of Galilee, also Kinneret, Lake of Gennesaret, or Lake Tiberias , is the largest freshwater lake in Israel, and it is approximately in circumference, about long, and wide. The lake has a total area of , and a maximum depth of approximately 43 m...

 referred to in the (body

Text corpus

In linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...

) of the Amarna letters

Amarna letters

The Amarna letters are an archive of correspondence on clay tablets, mostly diplomatic, between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom...

.

Tubu is the probable biblical town of Tob

Tob

Tob was the name of a place in ancient Israel, mentioned in the Bible.It is said to be the land to which Jephtha fled from his brothers. The location is not definitely known, but some identify it with the region centering on Taibiyah, southeast of Sea of Galilee...

. In the entire group of El Amarna letters, EA 205 is the only usage of the name Tubu, and only the "Man" (or Mayor/prince) is referenced.

The scribe

Scribe

A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing...

 who wrote EA 205, visited and /or wrote from 6 towns, 5 south of or neighboring, Damascus

Damascus

Damascus , commonly known in Syria as Al Sham , and as the City of Jasmine , is the capital and the second largest city of Syria after Aleppo, both are part of the country's 14 governorates. In addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major...

. Three were named, as only from the "Man" of the town. Three were designated by the "Leader" of the town, and one of the 6 towns, was not mentioned by name. These Amarna letters are all written from the time centering about 1350 BCE, and written in Akkadian

Akkadian language

Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...

 cuneiform

Cuneiform script

Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...

 on clay tablets.

Sources

• Index, Introduction, Maps, etc. in ...The Amarna Letters, Ed. and translated by William Moran
  William L. Moran
  William Lambert Moran was an American Assyriologist. He was born in Chicago, United States.In 1939, Moran joined the Jesuit order. He then attended Loyola University in Chicago, where he received his B.A. in 1944. After this, he taught Latin and Greek in a high school in Cincinnati between 1946...
  
  , French, and English, c. 1987, 1992.