"New Kingdom" is the term generally given to the five centuries of Egyptian history from circa 1550 to 1050 BC. The New Kingdom covers the 17th-20th Dynasties, during which the bounds of Egypt’s empire and international influence reached their greatest extent.
Historical summary
The New Kingdom was inaugurated (17th-18th Dynasties) by a family of Theban nobles, probably of Nubian descent, who led the war of liberation against the Asiatic Hyksos ruling in Middle and Lower Egypt. The reigns of Ahmose, Amenhotep I and Queen Hatshepsut represent a period of renewal and consolidation after the expulsion of the Hyksos; Lower Nubia was occupied and annexed and the frontier stood at Karoy, in the region of the fourth Nile cataract. In literature, art and architecture the classic period of the 12th Dynasty was used as a source of inspiration, sometimes to the point of item-by-item imitation.
Following a contretemps of political and ideological nature between Queen Hatshepsut and her nephew Tuthmose III, the latter acceded to full power on his aunt’s death and changed the course of history. Casting his action as a pre-emptive strike against the "Hyksos," Tuthmose III launched over seventeen campaigns in two decades against the coastlands of the Levant, which resulted in a repulse of the great empire of Mitanni (in what is now eastern Syria and northern Iraq), and an Egyptian frontier on the Euphrates. Although Amenhotep II, Tuthmose III’s son, lost the northern reach of this empire, Mitanni was eventually forced to sue for peace and sign a treaty with Tuthmose IV. Thereafter, a series of diplomatic marriages cemented the alliance between the two empires. The creation of the Egyptian empire resulted in an influx of thousands of Asiatic prisoners of war, merchants and settlers, and an ingress of Asiatic and Aegean products and ideas which transformed Egyptian art and technology.
The reign of Amenhotep III represents the flowering of Egyptian imperial culture. Fifty years of peace found Egypt the unrivalled superpower of the Near East, in receipt of vast amounts of taxes and tribute and the focus of world trade. Amenhotep III was the first king of the empire period who reflected Egypt’s dominant position in the boom of gigantic architectural memorials and refined arts. As the "dazzling sun-disc," his chosen sobriquet, he personified to the world a rich and surfeited land.
Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten as he called himself, son and successor of Amenhotep III, effected a revolution in religion and the arts by espousing the sun disk as sole god and declaring all other gods to have "ceased" (their existence). Along with the new monotheism went a new canon of art characterized by an iconoclastic purging of all traces of polytheism. The better to realize his program, Akhenaten rejected the old royal residences of Memphis and Thebes, and built a new city, Akhetaten ("Horizon-of-the-sun-disc"), in Middle Egypt where he could focus the entire economy of Egypt on the cult of his sole god. The monotheistic program, the personal creation of Akhenaten, could not be maintained by his ephemeral successors, and within fifteen years of his death a reaction set in. The temples to the sun disk were dismantled, the old cults reinstated and Akhenaten declared anathema.
Now discredited, the 18th Dynasty disappeared in the confusion attendant upon an outbreak of plague, and was succeeded by a succession of three unrelated military officers. The last of these, PaRamesses, or Ramesses I, installed his son Seti I as coregent and the 19th Dynasty thus came to power. Seti was bent on coming to grips with the Hittite empire in Anatolia, which had replaced Mitanni as the superpower of Asia and was threatening Egypt’s frontier in central Syria. A series of indecisive engagements culminated in the disastrous ambush of Egyptian forces at Qadesh on the Orontes in the fifth year of Seti’s successor, Ramesses II; thereafter most of Egypt’s territory beyond the Sinai was temporarily lost. But Ramesses fought back doggedly and by his twenty-first year had forced the Hittites, now faced by a hostile Assyria, to sign a peace treaty. Versions of this celebrated pact are extant in the original Hittite, and also in Akkadian and Egyptian translations.
The conclusion of hostilities ushered in a period of peace which saw a burst of international trade and commercial activity all around the Mediterranean. Ramesses II used the highly regimented military and civilian population of Egypt to set on foot a rebuilding program of vast proportions in which virtually all the temples of Egypt were either reconstructed or repaired. Archaeological and textual sources abound for this Ramesside age, and yield intimate glimpses of society at large, its businesses, occupations, entertainments and beliefs. Ramesses II and a few of his sons—his offspring officially numbered over 100—lived on in later legend as the super-king Sesostris, the wise Khaemweset and the blind Pheron. A royal archetype had been established which inspired Egypt and invited imitation for over six centuries.
Following the death of the great Ramesses II, the various branches of his family fell to squabbling over the succession, just at a time when a weakened administration had to face the pressure of ethnic migrations from Libya, Ionia and the Greek islands, seeking to settle in Egypt. The general ineptitude of the last scions of the house prompted a coup d’etat by one Sethnakht, whose origins are obscure. Thus was established the 20th Dynasty. Sethnakht’s son Ramesses III was able to effect a restoration of the country’s fortunes: in his fifth year he decisively defeated the Libyan tribe which had settled in Egypt, and in his eighth year a massive invasion of "Sea Peoples" from the Aegean was repulsed. Although the Asiatic principalities of the empire had been devastated by the incursions, Ramesses III by dint of effort extended his frontiers once again to central Syria.
Ramesses III and his eight like-named successors, however, faced numerous problems which in the aggregate spelled doom for the prosperity of the country. The onset of low inundations adversely affected agricultural productivity and granaries stood empty. The violence of the Sea People’s invasion had laid waste large parts of Asia Minor and Syria, and many of Egypt’s former trading partners no longer existed. Areas producing silver and iron (both absent in Egypt) were shut off from Egyptian traders, and copper and gold-producing regions were showing signs of exhaustion. Inflation hit the marketplace, and strikes by laborers were prevalent. Grave robbing became widespread and proved impossible for the authorities to stop. Gradually the state showed signs of a bifurcation between Middle Egypt and the Delta, where the royal family now resided permanently, and the Thebaid which came increasingly to be treated as the "House of Amen," under the high priests of this deity. When the last of the Ramessides, Ramesses XI, finally passed away and power shifted to the new city of Tanis, the culture, political structure and economy identified as the "New Kingdom" was effectively defunct.
Government
The role of monarch is correctly regarded as the king-pin of the entire structure of government during the New Kingdom. The 18th Dynasty kings harked back to the glorious 12th Dynasty kings, whose heirs they claimed to be. Prominent in the mythology of kingship was the motif of the divine birth of Pharaoh, sired by Amen-Re, King of the Gods. The king became "Son of Amen," the very likeness of the deity on earth, in possession of the kingship as an inheritance from his father. The 18th Dynasty had come to power in war, and the early Tuthmosids were imbued with a military spirit. While they relied on a "citizen" army, they created the institution of the "nursery" where selected children of the future king’s own age were brought up with him. From these companions, whose mothers achieved a degree of prominence in the 18th Dynasty, came the future officers and trusted henchmen of Pharaoh. The winning of the empire robbed the Tuthmosids of any military aura and the latter "image" of an 18th Dynasty pharaoh was that of a surfeited voluptuary. By contrast, the 19th Dynasty came from a family of professional army officers and the military was everywhere and at all times in receipt of favors and lofty status.
The personnel of government and administration were dominated by members of a few patrician families who had achieved prominence in the reunification of the country during the late 17th/early 18th Dynasties. These were "the most elite and choicest of the whole land…[with] a respectable lineage reaching back over generations" (Amenhotep III). Crisis points in this social system occurred when members of this sort of "family compact" were replaced willy-nilly by parvenus, when a new crop arose on the coat tails of a new regime, or when a gifted individual outside the circle broke in to wrest a high office.
In contrast to the parochial nature of Second Intermediate Period government, the New Kingdom shows a high degree of civilization. Branches of government tended to bifurcate between Upper and Lower Egypt, and to have their "head officers" in Memphis and Thebes, the chief royal residences. Here were located the judicial/executive "councils" (knbt) and the office of the vizier. The vizierate, a prime ministerial office, inherited directly from the Second Intermediate Period, was directly responsible to the king for the departments of agriculture, local administration, the judiciary, the workhouses, the state granaries (originally with the chief herald), the palace administration and the royal estates. In addition the vizier presided over the prestigous "Council of Thirty," a quasi-high court. He was not responsible for the treasury, the army or the provincial administration, all the heads of which reported directly to Pharaoh. By the time of Tuthmose III the heads of major departments received the title "king’s-scribe," the highest of the "mandarin-ranks" attainable. The middle-ranking civil servants were all scribes, called generically srw, "magistrates," drawn from the best of the scribal class and assigned posts and functions all over Egypt. In contrast, the "support staffs" (smdt) at the lower end of the bureaucracy were recruited locally and functioned close to home.
In the countryside, power gravitated to the capital from the townships or "nomes," now no longer administrative units. Towns were governed by "mayors" (non-hereditary) or by a scribe and council; in either case, complete control of the local bailiwicks was retained by the vizier. Towns continued to be centered upon the temples of the local municipal gods, but for the purposes of administration had become little more than collection centers for taxes and rents. They could, however, still levy harbor fees on shipping. Tuthmose III began the practice of making an annual progress throughout Egypt to inspect the state of the local governments, but not all his successors followed suit.
Society
Society in the New Kingdom mirrored the hierarchy of the administration. At the apex sat the pharaoh; he, his queen(s) and harims owned large estates throughout Egypt providing produce and riches for a royal privy purse. The chief steward of the king was a very powerful individual, responsible directly to the crown, and usually recruited outside the hereditary nobility. Where the king chose to reside (usually in the Memphite region), there lived also the chief men of government and anyone of any consequence: their roots may have been diverse, but service to the crown necessitated their residence at court. The importance of those who had shared in the wars and the phenomenon of the royal nursery had created a new aristocracy which eclipsed and replaced the old provincial nobility. Now prominent and respectable and endowed with hereditary rights were the scribe, the soldier and the priest. The rural population consisted largely of tenants and sharecroppers, renting land from some of the large landowning institutions, or field hands tied permanently to the soil under a farm manager.
With the creation of the empire came an influx of foreign peoples into Egypt. Prisoners of war constituted the largest single group. These were usually registered, branded and assigned to farms, workhouses or weaving shops. Others were recruited for work in quarries, or on construction sites or as domestics. In the late Ramesside period Canaanite butlers are found in the royal palace. Merchants and their ships frequented the harbors of Memphis and Thebes, and a quarter of the former city was set aside for their residence as a trading post. The commercial and demographic impact of Asia on Egypt resulted in the ingress of numerous foreign words into the Egyptian language.
Economics
Numerous papyri from the New Kingdom provide evidence on taxation and commerce. The yield of the grain harvest (emmer wheat and barley) was estimated yearly by measurement of the fields under cultivation and the nilometer’s prediction of the height of the inundation. At harvest time, state and private vessels made the circuit of landing stages to collect a proportion of the yield as grain tax and rent. Other taxes included a quota placed on towns and offices to cover budgetary needs of institutions (usually temples), dues levied on support staffs, a tax imposed on (manufactured) products of labor, and "benevolences" expected from high officers of state. These taxes were imposed on Egypt and its empire alike, but that did not prevent a lively trade between Egypt and the Mediterranean littoral. From Asia, Egypt received oil, wine, cedarwood, boxwood, tin, metalwork, chariotry and weapons; from Cyprus, copper; from Anatolia, silver and (some) iron; and from the Aegean, unguents and spices. In return, Egypt shipped wheat and barley, luxury goods and tropical products from its African sphere of influence.
The climatic changes which brought on a series of diminished inundations in the twelfth century BC, and the foreign invasions of Sea Peoples and Libyans, largely curtailed this trade. The resultant privations and social and political dislocation were catastrophic for the empire. The Ramessides discredited themselves, and political power gravitated to a new regime in a newly created city, Tanis. Thebes and its god Amen lost their royal and imperial status, and Egyptian society lost its elan vital. In short, the New Kingdom was dead.
