The papyrus belongs to the cultural world of the New Kingdom, when Egypt's connections with the Levant carried people, goods and religious ideas across political borders. Astarte, associated with warfare and other divine powers in the eastern Mediterranean, was also worshipped in Egypt. In this Egyptian narrative she is called a daughter of Ptah, placing her within an Egyptian divine relationship. That connection is important: the story does not merely set two isolated pantheons against each other, but presents a goddess who could be understood within more than one religious tradition.

The surviving manuscript is conventionally identified as pBN 202 plus pAmherst 9. The former is held in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the latter belongs to the Morgan Library in New York. It is written in hieratic, the cursive Egyptian script used for many literary and administrative works, rather than being a surviving illustrated scene of a goddess before the sea. Its original findspot is not securely known. The physical fragments are historical objects even though the events of the narrative belong to mythology.

The dating needs particular care. The opening's reference to the fifth year of Amenhotep II provides a royal setting in the Eighteenth Dynasty. It does not automatically prove that every surviving part of the manuscript was written during that reign. Scholars have weighed the handwriting, language and format differently, allowing for either an early composition and manuscript or a later copy. The academic Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae accordingly gives a range spanning the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties rather than a single certain date around 1200 BCE.

Within the surviving story, the Sea is a divine force demanding tribute from the gods. The name Yam is commonly used when discussing its relationship with the sea deity of Levantine tradition. Astarte has a prominent part in the negotiations, and damaged passages refer to singing, divine valuables and demands concerning the goddess herself. These elements create the outline of a confrontation in which gifts and submission are intended to avert disaster. The gaps are too extensive to turn every exchange into a fully preserved sequence of speeches, motives and decisions.

Set, also written Seth, is connected with the damaged later part of the narrative. His storm-god associations have encouraged comparison with the Ugaritic story in which Baal fights Yam. That parallel is useful for interpretation, but it does not restore the missing Egyptian ending. A reconstruction in which Set defeats the Sea should therefore be recognised as a scholarly proposal, not quoted as the surviving final scene. Whether Astarte's threatened relationship with the Sea was fulfilled, prevented or transformed cannot be answered securely from the extant fragments.

The history of publication is itself part of the record's significance. Percy Newberry published the Amherst material in 1899, while later studies reconsidered the text and its interpretation. Philippe Collombert and Laurent Coulon's study of pBN 202 in 2000 established a fuller opening and renewed discussion of its royal setting. Other Egyptian works mentioning Astarte, such as the separate Harris Magical Papyrus, provide comparative evidence but are not passages from this manuscript. The Astarte Papyrus is best approached as a damaged literary work whose cultural connections can be studied without pretending that its missing pages have survived.