Amenhotep II was born into a powerful royal family. His father was Thutmose III and his mother was Queen Merytre-Hatshepsut. An older royal son, Amenemhat, had died before he could succeed their father, and Amenhotep became the heir. Accounts of his youth connect him with Memphis and the royal stables, where horses, chariots and archery formed part of a prince's military education. His later monuments boast that he could pierce copper targets with arrows, handle exceptionally powerful bows and outlast a large crew at rowing. Such descriptions mattered because Egyptian kingship linked physical mastery with the ability to defeat disorder. They should be read as royal claims, shaped to impress subjects and rivals, rather than treated as independently verified sporting records.

He probably came to the throne as a young man, and a period of joint rule with Thutmose III has been proposed. The precise chronology and length of any co-regency remain debated. His military records describe campaigns in the Levant and the suppression of resistance to Egyptian authority. One of the starkest accounts is preserved in the Amada inscription: the king is credited with killing seven enemy rulers and having their bodies displayed, six at Thebes and one at Napata in Nubia. The account presents punishment as a warning to opponents of Egypt. Its political purpose remains visible alongside its brutality: the pharaoh is portrayed as the destroyer of rebellion.

Further campaign records show Amenhotep II operating in a region of competing city-states and great powers. Mitanni was an important rival for influence in Syria, while Egyptian officials and local rulers negotiated the demands of imperial government. The king's inscriptions celebrate captives, plunder and the submission of opponents, but they give the Egyptian court's version of events. They do not reveal every setback, negotiation or local consequence. Later relations with neighbouring powers involved diplomacy as well as force. His reign can therefore be understood as the effort to maintain an inherited empire, not simply a sequence in which one display of terror permanently ended all resistance.

At home, Amenhotep II supported building and temple work across Egypt and Nubia. The temple at Amada, begun under Thutmose III, preserves important inscriptions from his reign. At Giza he was associated with the worship of Horemakhet, the solar form linked with the Great Sphinx, and his monuments connected royal strength with the prestige of Egypt's past. His tomb, KV35, was cut into the Valley of the Kings. It belonged to the royal funerary landscape of the New Kingdom, where burial architecture and religious decoration prepared the dead ruler for an existence beyond the human world. The tomb would eventually acquire a second purpose as a protected resting place for other members of the royal dead.

A letter attributed to Amenhotep II survives in a monumental copy associated with Usersatet, his viceroy of Kush. It refers to their shared military world and expresses the king's attitudes towards foreign subjects and the appointment of officials. The text is valuable because it preserves a more personal-sounding form of royal communication than a formal victory account. Even so, a carved copy is not a surviving handwritten letter, and its language remains part of the politics of rule. The message offers evidence for the language and attitudes of royal government, while Usersatet's private response remains unknown.

Amenhotep II ruled for at least twenty-six years and was buried in KV35. Victor Loret discovered the tomb in 1898 and found the king's mummy in its sarcophagus, with a bow alongside it. The tomb was not an untouched burial sealed continuously since the king's funeral: priests had reused it to protect other royal mummies. Among those placed there were Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III and Seti II, together with several later rulers. Thutmose IV was Amenhotep II's son and successor. Its significance lies in both the king's original burial and the later effort to safeguard Egypt's royal dead.