Quick questions on Pharaoh, government and the army in New Kingdom Egypt: HSC Ancient History

The pharaoh held absolute formal authority as the living Horus and the Son of Ra, standing between the gods and humanity. His core roles were religious (chief priest of every cult in Egypt, performing rites on the gods' behalf), military (commander-in-chief and, ideologically, the sole defender of Egypt against chaos and foreign enemies), judicial (the final source of law and justice) and economic (nominal owner of all land and the ultimate recipient of all tribute). In practice, as this dot point shows, nearly all of this authority was exercised through delegated officials, but every one of those officials derived legitimacy from acting in the king's name.

Ma'at was both an abstract principle, truth, justice, order and balance, and a goddess, shown as a woman wearing a single ostrich feather on her head. Its opposite, isfet, meant chaos and disorder. The pharaoh's fundamental duty, repeated in temple inscriptions across the New Kingdom, was to "uphold Ma'at" by ruling justly, performing correct ritual for the gods, and keeping Egypt's borders secure against isfet in the form of foreign enemies.

By the New Kingdom, Egypt was governed by two viziers (tjaty), one for Upper Egypt based at Thebes and one for Lower Egypt based at Memphis, each reporting to the king daily. The fullest surviving description of the office is the text modern Egyptologists call the "Duties of the Vizier," inscribed on the walls of the Theban tomb of Rekhmire (TT100), vizier of Upper Egypt under Thutmose III and into the reign of Amenhotep II.

The New Kingdom army began as the professional standing force built during the war of liberation against the Hyksos under Ahmose I, and it remained the institution that turned a reunified Egypt into an empire under Amenhotep III's warlike ancestors, Thutmose I and Thutmose III especially. It was organised into two main branches: infantry, armed with bronze weapons and shields and grouped into companies, and chariotry, an elite mobile arm using the horse-drawn, two-man chariot and the composite bow, technologies Egypt had adopted from its Hyksos-period enemies.