The
Amarna letters (sometimes referred to as the
Amarna correspondence or
Amarna tablets) 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. 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. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are mostly written in
Akkadian cuneiform, the writing system of ancient
Mesopotamia, rather than that of ancient Egypt. The known tablets total 382: 24 tablets had been recovered since the Norwegian Assyriologist
Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's landmark edition of the Amarna letters,
Die El-Amarna-Tafel, published in two volumes (1907 and 1915). The written correspondence spans a period of at most thirty years.