The papers presented in this volume sum up the results of the First International Conference of the Austrian Research Network Imperium and Officium: Comparative Studies in Ancient Bureaucracy and Officialdom held in Vienna in November 2010. Its aim was to study communication strategies within an official context by analysing the rhetoric and function of administrative letters in order to gain an insight into the structures of governmental control and bureaucratic mentalities. Its contributions pursue a diachronic and comparative approach focusing on polities and empires in the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean World in the period from the first millennium BC to the first millennium AD and covering the fields of Assyriology, Ancient History, and Arabic and Islamic Studies.