New Kingdom Egypt Begins

Around 1550 BCE, Egypt entered the New Kingdom, the period in which it became the most powerful and far-reaching state in its long history. Beginning with the Eighteenth Dynasty and lasting roughly until 1070 BCE, this era saw Egypt build an empire stretching from deep in Nubia to the edge of Syria, accumulate enormous wealth, and produce some of the best-known pharaohs and monuments in the ancient world. The date is approximate, as Egyptologists place the start of the dynasty somewhere in the mid-sixteenth century BCE and debate the exact chronology.

The background was a period of fragmentation known as the Second Intermediate Period. During it, a dynasty of Levantine origin, called the Hyksos, ruled the Nile Delta from their capital at Avaris, while a native Egyptian line based at Thebes controlled the south. Nubian power to the south, centered on the kingdom of Kerma, added further pressure. Theban rulers, including Seqenenre Tao and Kamose, fought the Hyksos, and their successor Ahmose I finished the task, expelling them and reuniting the country. He is usually credited as the founder of the New Kingdom.

Ahmose and his successors pushed Egypt's borders outward, partly to create buffer zones against future invaders. Nubia was conquered and exploited for its gold, and Egyptian officials and temples spread along the Nile southward. In the north, campaigns into the Levant brought cities under Egyptian influence. The greatest expansion came under Thutmose III, who ruled for over fifty years, first alongside his stepmother and co-ruler Hatshepsut and then alone. His campaigns, including the Battle of Megiddo, extended Egyptian control or tribute demands across Canaan and Syria toward the Euphrates. Egypt ruled less through direct administration than through local vassal rulers, garrisons, and the taking of hostages from elite families.

The wealth of empire paid for monumental building. Temples at Karnak and Luxor grew enormously, and rulers were buried in rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings rather than in pyramids. The period also included Akhenaten's religious experiment centered on the sun-disk Aten, the brief reign of Tutankhamun, and the long rule of Ramesses II in the Nineteenth Dynasty, who contested Syria with the Hittites at Kadesh and later concluded one of history's earliest known peace treaties.

The New Kingdom faded in the twelfth century BCE, amid the wider upheavals of the Late Bronze Age collapse, including pressure from groups the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, economic strain, and political fragmentation. Yet its legacy endured. Much of what the modern world pictures as ancient Egypt, from golden masks to colossal temple statues, comes from this era, and its diplomacy and imperial methods shaped the politics of the ancient Near East.