Letters comprise the majority of the Amarna tablets and have been extensively studied in the modern period by scholars interested in ancient history and international relations. It seems likely that the Amarna Letters were discovered in these buildings, all part of a larger administrative complex located near the royal palace in what is now known as the “Central City” of Amarna. A few fragments of letters and school texts were excavated in this administrative building, but tablets were also recovered from nearby buildings over the course of various archaeological expeditions. h.” on stamped bricks (also called the “Records Office” in modern scholarship)-as the site of the original discovery. Locals identified a particular building-named “The Place of the Correspondence of Pharaoh, l. Archaeologists working at Tell el-Amarna following the initial find tried to ascertain the exact spot of the tablets’ discovery but were met with conflicting evidence. Secondhand accounts indicate that the tablets were uncovered either by a peasant woman or a group of local farmers it is also possible that they came from private, undocumented excavations. Most of the tablets were found in 1887, but details concerning their discovery are vague and contradictory.
These texts are housed today in museums and collections across the world, including two examples in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum ( 24.2.11 24.2.12). The majority of the tablets are letters (hence the modern designation “Amarna Letters”) written from rulers of the lands north of Egypt, but a few are letters from the Egyptian king, and there are also tablets inscribed with myths, epics, syllabaries, lexical texts, and other lists-the kinds of texts that were used to learn cuneiform writing. Since Egypt is outside the area where cuneiform writing developed, the Amarna Letters testify to the use of the Mesopotamian script and the Akkadian language across the eastern Mediterranean during this period. and were found at the site of Tell el-Amarna, the short-lived capital of ancient Egypt during the reign of Amenhotep IV / Akhenaten (ca. The Amarna Letters are a group of several hundred clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing that date to the fourteenth century B.C.
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