The Amarna Letters were born from the routine of empire. In the fourteenth century BCE, Egypt controlled a network of vassal city-states stretching from Syria to the Sinai, and the pharaohs Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten received constant correspondence from their subjects and their peers. Most of the letters were written in Akkadian using cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script developed in Mesopotamia, because this language served communication between many courts of the ancient Near East. Scribes in Canaan, Babylon, Mitanni, and Hatti all wrote in this same script, though the Canaanite governors often laced their Akkadian with local idioms and Canaanite glosses, creating a mixed dialect that scholars now call Canaanite-Akkadian. Each tablet was shaped from clay, impressed with a reed stylus while wet, and allowed to dry; firing was not essential to preserve every example. The length of the message and the scribe's layout helped determine a tablet's size; some carried writing on several surfaces.

The defining drama of the archive is the voice of Rib-Addi of Byblos, whose numerous letters form one of its most substantial bodies of correspondence. Rib-Addi ruled the port city of Byblos, modern Jbeil in Lebanon, and repeatedly appealed to the pharaoh as his position became more precarious. He accused Abdi-Ashirta of Amurru and other rivals of threatening Egyptian interests, asked for troops and supplies, and insisted that his own loyalty deserved protection. The repeated demands can sound painfully immediate, but they are also political arguments: Rib-Addi had reasons to emphasise danger and to portray his opponents as enemies of Egypt. The letters preserve a ruler struggling to obtain help across a great distance, not a complete, neutral account of every event in his city.

Another powerful voice belongs to Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem, whose six letters are conventionally numbered EA 285 to EA 290. He insists that his authority depends on the Egyptian king and that his opponents, including Milkilu of Gezer and the sons of Lab'ayu of Shechem, threaten the king's interests. He reports losses of territory and accuses groups described as 'Apiru of contributing to the disorder. His appeals for archers and royal attention reveal how a local ruler tried to turn Egyptian power towards his own urgent needs. These letters are important early evidence for Jerusalem and its political relationships. They give us the voice of a participant seeking support, not an account written with the detachment of a later historian.

The archive also holds the correspondence of equals. The Great Kings of the Near East addressed the pharaoh as "my brother," a term of diplomatic equality that recognised Egypt as one of the great powers of the age. Tushratta of Mitanni sent letters and gifts, including the dispatch of a cult image of the goddess Shaushka, and negotiated the marriage of his daughter Tadukhepa to Amenhotep III. Burnaburiash of Babylon complained that his merchants had been murdered in Canaan and demanded compensation. The king of Assyria, newly risen to power, wrote to announce himself as a brother king, a claim to recognition among the major powers. The king of Hatti, the Hittite empire that was swallowing Mitanni, sent threats and demands. These letters reveal a world of elaborate protocol, of gift exchange and royal marriages, of envoys who travelled for months between courts, and of kings who measured their status by the quality of the gold they received.

The tablets are associated with the administrative quarter at Amarna, the capital Akhenaten built for the Aten. One building is identified by stamped bricks as the Place of the Correspondence of Pharaoh, although the circumstances of the initial discoveries cannot all be reconstructed. When the royal court left Amarna, some records remained behind. In 1887 tablets began entering the antiquities market, and museums acquired parts of the dispersed archive. Petrie's excavations in 1891-1892 recovered further material, followed by other expeditions. Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon's Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, published in 1907-1915, became a foundational edition, and later scholarship expanded and revised the catalogue and readings. The tablets are now held in several collections, but together they remain an extraordinary source for the language and political relationships of the fourteenth century BCE.