Egyptian New Kingdom
▶ Explore on the mapThe New Kingdom was the age of ancient Egypt's greatest power, from about 1550 to 1077 BCE, when pharaohs ruled from Nubia to the Euphrates. Ahmose I expelled the Hyksos from the delta around 1550 and founded the eighteenth dynasty; his successors built an empire by conquest and by diplomacy, sealing treaties with the great kings of Mitanni and Hatti. Hatshepsut, who ruled as a king in her own right from about 1478, sent a trading fleet to Punt and built her terraced temple at Deir el-Bahri. Thutmose III, remembered as the Napoleon of Egypt, campaigned seventeen times and took the Levant as far as Syria. Akhenaten moved the court to a new city, Akhetaten, and worshipped the Aten alone until the experiment was reversed after his death. The boy-king Tutankhamun restored the old gods, and his tomb, found almost intact in 1922, gives the modern world its image of pharaonic gold. Ramses II fought the Hittites at Kadesh, signed the first surviving peace treaty and built at Abu Simbel and Karnak. Ramesses III repelled the Sea Peoples, but internal decay, tomb robbery and the rise of the high priests of Amun weakened the state until the twentieth dynasty ended and Egypt split once more.