page_title: Amarna letters
section_title: Letter summary
hierarchical_section_title: Amarna letters / The letters / Letter summary
context_page_description: The Amarna letters are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru during the New Kingdom, between c. 1360–1332 BC. The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are mostly written in a script known as Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, rather than that of ancient Egypt, and the language used has sometimes been characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian. The written correspondence spans a period of at most thirty years.
  The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, which came out in two volumes and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available.
context_section_description: Amarna Letters are politically arranged in rough counterclockwise fashion:
  001–014 Babylonia
  015–016 Assyria
  017–030 Mitanni
  031–032 Arzawa
  033–040 Alashiya
  041–044 Hatti
  045–380+ Syria/Lebanon/Canaan
  Amarna Letters from Syria/Lebanon/Canaan are distributed roughly:
  045–067 Syria
  068–227 Lebanon (where 68–140 are from Gubla aka Byblos)
  227–380 Canaan (written mostly in the Canaano-Akkadian language).
caption: Map of the ancient Near East during the Amarna period, showing the great powers of the period: Egypt (green), Mycenaean Greece (orange), Hatti (yellow), the Kassite kingdom of Babylon (purple), Assyria (grey), and Mitanni (red). Lighter areas show direct control, darker areas represent spheres of influence.
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