Even the Bedawin shekhs, who acted as free-lances in Palestine, sent letters to the Pharaoh and read his replies.

The archive-chambers of the cities of Canaan contained numberless documents contemporaneous with the events they recorded, and the libraries were filled with the treasures of Babylonian literature, with legends and stories of the gods, and the earlier history of the East.

Doubtless, as in Babylonia, so too in Palestine there were also in them contracts and inventories of property, dated in the Babylonian fashion by the events which characterised the years of a king's reign.
The scribes and upper classes could read and write, and therefore had access to all these stores of literature and historical materials.
There is no longer any reason, therefore, for doubting that Moses and his contemporaries could have read and written books, or that the Hebrew legislator was learned in "all the wisdom of the Egyptians." If we are to reject the historical trustworthiness of the Pentateuch, it must be on other grounds than the assumption of the illiterateness of the age or the impossibility of compiling at the time an accurate register of facts.

The Tel el-Amarna tablets have made it impossible to return to the old critical point of view; the probabilities henceforward are in favour of the early date and historical truth of the Old Testament narratives, and not against them.

Accurately-dated history and a reading public existed in Babylonia long before the days of Abraham; in the age of Moses the whole Eastern world from the Nile to the Euphrates was knit together in the bonds of literary intercourse, and all who were in contact with the great nations of the East--with Egypt, with Babylonia, or with Assyria--came of necessity under its influence and held the book and its author in the highest reverence.
But besides thus revolutionising our ideas of the age that preceded the Hebrew Exodus, the Tel el-Amarna letters have thrown a welcome light on the political causes of the Exodus itself.