This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For roughly three centuries in the Late Bronze Age, if a king in Egypt wanted to write to a king in Babylon, Assyria or the Hittite capital of Hattusa, he wrote in Akkadian, whether or not Akkadian was spoken in either of their courts. The clearest evidence for this is the Amarna letters, a cache of roughly three hundred and eighty clay tablets discovered in 1887 at the ruins of Akhetaten, the short lived Egyptian capital built by the pharaoh Akhenaten. The tablets, mostly written between the reigns of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE, preserve the diplomatic correspondence of a genuinely international system: letters between the Great Powers, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and the Hittites, negotiating royal marriages and exchanges of gold, and letters from Egypt's own vassal rulers in Canaan and Syria pleading for support against rival city states and raiding groups. None of these courts spoke Akkadian as a native language. They used it because Akkadian cuneiform had already become the region's shared administrative and diplomatic idiom, learned by professional scribes the way a modern civil service might train staff in a language used only for official correspondence. A Canaanite vassal's scribe writing to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh's own scribe writing back, were both working in a learned second language neither ruler necessarily read himself. The arrangement is one of the earliest well documented examples of a true lingua franca, a common tongue adopted for its practical reach rather than any political dominance by its native speakers, laying down a pattern of borrowed prestige languages for cross border communication that would recur again and again in later history.