Quick questions on New Kingdom Egypt from Amenhotep III to Ramesses II - survey and sources: HSC Ancient History

The period runs across roughly 180 years and about nine reigns, conventionally dated (the "c." matters - these are reconstructed, not absolute, dates), falling into four phases.

New Kingdom Egypt was the narrow, flood-fed valley and Delta of the Nile, framed by the Eastern and Western Deserts, closed to the north by the Mediterranean and to the south by the rapids of the First Cataract near Aswan, the frontier with Nubia (Kush). Beyond the cataract, Nubia supplied gold, ivory and ebony. Across the Sinai lay the Levant (Canaan and Syria), a patchwork of vassal city-states, and beyond them the "Great Powers": Mitanni in northern Syria, and, increasingly through this period, the Hittites (Hatti) in Anatolia, along with Babylon and Assyria.

Unlike the earlier New Kingdom, this period opens not in recovery but at the peak. Decades of secure tribute since the conquests of Thutmose III had made the reign of Amenhotep III the wealthiest and most confident of the Eighteenth Dynasty. What follows is a period defined by disruption and recovery: a religious revolution that broke with centuries of tradition, a restoration that tried to erase it, the fall of one dynasty and the rise of another, and a Ramesside reassertion of imperial power that ended in the longest reign of the age.

Amenhotep III inherited and enjoyed an empire secured by his predecessors. Decades of tribute funded the vast Malkata palace and festival complex on the west bank at Thebes, the great Luxor Temple, and a diplomatic network of royal marriages recorded in the earliest Amarna Letters. Egyptologists Betsy Bryan and Arielle Kozloff titled their study of the reign "Egypt's Dazzling Sun," a fair summary of the wealth and confidence of these years.

His son ruled first as Amenhotep IV, then changed his name to Akhenaten, elevated the sun-disc the Aten to sole state god, suppressed the cult of Amun, and built a new capital, Akhetaten (modern Amarna), on virgin desert. This was the most radical break in Egyptian history, expressed in a new art style and a new theology. A brief, shadowy successor (Smenkhkare, or a female king Neferneferuaten) reigned c.

The boy-king Tutankhamun (originally Tutankhaten) abandoned Amarna, restored the traditional cults and returned the court to Memphis and Thebes, as his Restoration Stela proclaims. After the brief reign of the elderly Ay, the general Horemheb (c. 1323-1295 BC) stabilised the state, dismantled Akhenaten's monuments, and, dying without a son, passed the throne to his vizier - ending the Eighteenth Dynasty.

Ramesses I founded the Nineteenth Dynasty; his son Seti I (c. 1294-1279 BC) reasserted Egyptian power in Syria and built magnificently at Abydos and Karnak. His son Ramesses II (c.

The great temples carry the official record: Amenhotep III's Luxor Temple and the reliefs of Seti I and Ramesses II at Karnak, the Kadesh reliefs at Abu Simbel and the Ramesseum (Ramesses II's mortuary temple at Thebes), and royal stelae such as Tutankhamun's Restoration Stela. These are contemporary, dated and located, but they are royal or religious ideology: they credit kings and gods, frame every reign as the maintenance of Ma'at against chaos, and suppress failure. The Kadesh reliefs, showing Ramesses II single-handedly routing the Hittites, are the classic example of monumental propaganda outrunning the facts.

Around 380 clay tablets, written in Akkadian cuneiform (the diplomatic language of the age), were found at Amarna in 1887. They record correspondence, spanning the reigns of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten, between the Egyptian court and both Levantine vassals and the Great Powers (Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, Hatti). They are invaluable for the mechanics of the empire and foreign relations, but most were written by anxious petitioners pursuing their own agendas, so they are one-sided pleading, not an Egyptian government record.

Two very different bodies of tomb evidence stand out. The intact tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62), found by Howard Carter in 1922, preserves a near-complete royal burial - thousands of objects giving unmatched evidence of royal wealth, funerary religion and the restoration after Amarna, though it is the burial of one short-reigned king. The workmen's village of Deir el-Medina, occupied through the Ramesside period, has yielded thousands of ostraca and papyri documenting the pay, disputes and daily life of the tomb-builders, including the earliest recorded strike, though it reflects one small, atypical community.

The Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC) is recorded in two Egyptian written accounts, the Poem (a literary narrative) and the Bulletin (a shorter caption text), alongside the reliefs, repeated across Abu Simbel, the Ramesseum, Karnak, Luxor and Abydos. These present the battle as a personal triumph; in reality it was an inconclusive draw. The peace treaty that eventually followed (c.

Two limitations run through the whole record. First, the monumental sources are propaganda by design. Second, the Amarna period was subjected to a damnatio: succeeding regimes dismantled Akhenaten's monuments, reused his talatat blocks as rubble fill, hacked out the Aten and Akhenaten's name, and referred to him only as "the enemy" or "the criminal of Akhetaten."

The chronological framework comes from much later: the Turin Canon (a Ramesside-era papyrus of kings and reign lengths), the Abydos King List of Seti I, and Manetho's Aegyptiaca (3rd century BC), whose thirty-dynasty scheme is still used. All are late and, in the Egyptian lists, ideologically selective: the Abydos list and the Turin Canon omit the Amarna kings (Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay), jumping from Amenhotep III to Horemheb, and Manetho survives only in disagreeing later quotations. They give a skeleton to be tested against contemporary monuments, not an independent authority.