Egyptian New Kingdom

Politics and institutions

The New Kingdom was Egypt's imperial age, founded when Ahmose I expelled the Hyksos from the delta around 1550 BCE and reunited the Two Lands under the eighteenth dynasty. The pharaohs of the age ruled an empire that ran from Nubia, governed by a viceroy of Kush, to the Euphrates, with garrisons, tribute and, in the north, a diplomacy of equals — the kings of Egypt wrote as brothers to the great kings of Mitanni, Hatti and Babylon. Inside the machine, Hatshepsut ruled as a king in her own right from about 1478; Thutmose III took the Levant in seventeen campaigns; Akhenaten moved the court to his new city of Akhetaten and imposed the sole worship of the Aten until the experiment was reversed; and the Ramessides of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties held the system for its final two centuries.

Economy and finance

The empire's wealth was gold, tribute and trade. Nubia's goldfields were the state's treasury — the tribute of Kush filled the vaults of Amun — and the Levantine provinces paid in grain, timber, slaves and silver, while cedar came from Byblos, myrrh from the trading voyages to Punt, and copper from Cyprus. The temple estates grew vast: by the late twentieth dynasty the house of Amun owned land, ships, workshops and its own labor force, an economy inside the economy. The workmen's village of Deir el-Medina, cutting and painting the royal tombs, records in its ostraca a paid, strike-prone labor force — the wages and grain rations that held the tomb economy together. War paid too: the campaigns of Thutmose III and the triumphs of Ramesses III were financed by what they seized.

Society and culture

New Kingdom culture was a culture of monuments and of experiment. The Valley of the Kings hid the royal burials while mortuary temples faced the flood plain — Hatshepsut's terraces at Deir el-Bahri, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu — and the artists of Deir el-Medina set the standard for Egyptian painting. Akhenaten's revolution changed art as much as religion: the Amarna style's flowing, domestic realism survives in the bust of Nefertiti. Literature kept the classics while adding new genres; medicine, mathematics and astronomical calendars were copied onto papyri. And the period's greatest modern afterlife began in 1922, when Howard Carter opened the almost intact tomb of Tutankhamun — the boy-king who restored the old gods — and gave the world its image of pharaonic gold.

Military and frontiers

The New Kingdom's military was a chariot empire. After the Hyksos taught Egypt the war chariot, pharaohs fielded divisions of archers and chariotry, backed by foreign mercenaries — the Sherden guards of Ramesses II among them. Thutmose III's campaign of Megiddo opened the road to Syria, and seventeen campaigns made the Levant an Egyptian province. The test of the age came at Kadesh in 1274 BCE, where Ramesses II fought the Hittite host to a draw and then, in 1259, signed the earliest surviving peace treaty, its silver tablet and its terms of alliance recorded on temple walls. The last great effort was Ramesses III's defense against the Sea Peoples — the coalition that had broken the Hittite world — depicted in reliefs at Medinet Habu and settled, in part, by settling the defeated as garrison troops.

Foreign relations

The diplomacy of the New Kingdom created the first documented system of great-power politics. The Amarna letters — the archive of Akhenaten's court — preserve the correspondence of Babylon, Mitanni, Hatti, Assyria and Cyprus: marriage negotiations, gift exchanges, complaints about gold's weight. Equals addressed pharaoh as brother; vassals in the Levant as lord. The treaty with Hatti after Kadesh bound the two powers to mutual defense and succession aid, and its Hittite copy stands among the founding documents of international law. To the south, the viceroy of Kush administered Nubia as a province; to the sea, trade and pirates both came. The Sea Peoples' assault of Ramesses III's eighth year closed the system: within a century of his death the empire's foreign connections were thinning along with its taxes.

Legacy and influence

The New Kingdom left Egypt's deepest imprint on the modern imagination. Tutankhamun's gold, Abu Simbel — moved stone by stone in the 1960s in one of UNESCO's founding rescues — and the Ramesseum's fallen colossus have made the age the image of pharaonic Egypt. Its treaty with Hatti is still cited as diplomacy's first surviving text; its Amarna episode still feeds debates about the origins of monotheism. Politically, the age ended as it began, in fragmentation: tomb robberies tried by documents, labor strikes, the high priests of Amun ruling the south, and after the twentieth dynasty the empire dissolved into the divisions of the Third Intermediate Period — remembered ever since as Egypt at its height.