Tékumel is the setting of Professor M. A. R. Barker's The Empire of the Petal Throne which was published by TSR as an RPG in 1975, and has been supported by language dictionaries and other linguistic tools, games, fiction and periodicals, both official and fan-created, for over thirty years. Conceived years before the RPG (or any RPG), the world was originally created as a forum for Barker's invented languages, the most prominent of which is Tsolyáni. Rather than using European influences, Barker drew on Indian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, and Meso-American myths to develop the social, political, and military organization, law, technology and other elements of his world.

Tékumel is set on a planet in the far future that was settled by space-traveling humans, but which was subsequently shunted into a pocket dimension and has been isolated for 50,000 years. While technological artifacts from that period remain, the setting is primarily fantastic, with extraplanar sources of magic and entities known as demons. The majority of the supporting material focuses on Five Empires in the northern hemisphere, and the humans and two native species (Hlüss and the Ssú).