Quick questions on New Kingdom Egypt to the death of Thutmose IV - survey and sources: HSC Ancient History

The period runs across roughly a century and a half and eight reigns, conventionally dated (the "c." matters - these are reconstructed, not absolute, dates).

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 traditional 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 city-states, and beyond them the "Great Powers" - Mitanni in northern Syria, the emerging Hittites (Hatti), Babylon and Assyria. This geography set the two axes of the period's history: expansion south into Nubia for resources, and north-east into Syria-Palestine for prestige, tribute and buffer territory.

The New Kingdom is defined against the disunity that preceded it. During the Second Intermediate Period (Dynasties 15 to 17), the Hyksos, a Levantine dynasty, ruled the Delta from Avaris, while a rival Egyptian line ruled the south from Thebes, hemmed in between the Hyksos to the north and the Kushite kingdom of Kerma to the south. The late Seventeenth Dynasty Theban kings Seqenenre Tao (whose mummy shows appalling head wounds) and Kamose (known from the Kamose stelae) opened a war of liberation.

Ahmose I completed the expulsion of the Hyksos, capturing Avaris and besieging Sharuhen in southern Palestine (events known chiefly from the tomb biography of Ahmose son of Ibana), reunified Egypt under Theban leadership and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty, conventionally c. 1550 BC.

Amenhotep I (c. 1525-1504 BC) and Thutmose I (c. 1504-1492 BC) pushed south into Nubia and north-east into Syria-Palestine, Thutmose I's campaign reputedly reaching the Euphrates.

Amenhotep II (c. 1427-1400 BC) campaigned to hold rather than extend the empire, and Thutmose IV (c. 1400-1390 BC) moved toward a negotiated peace with the former rival Mitanni, sealed by a diplomatic marriage.

The Kamose stelae (the war of liberation), the annals of Thutmose III at Karnak (his Syro-Palestinian campaigns), the Deir el-Bahri Punt and divine-birth reliefs of Hatshepsut, and the Dream Stela of Thutmose IV at Giza give dated, located, contemporary detail found nowhere else. But all were made for gods and posterity: they credit royal and divine success, frame every reign as the restoration of Ma'at against chaos, and omit failure. The Dream Stela's claim that a god promised Thutmose IV the throne is a legitimation device, not a factual record.

The inscriptions in the tomb of the naval officer Ahmose son of Ibana at el-Kab (the Hyksos war and early campaigns), the architect Ineni (TT81, who records the secret cutting of Thutmose I's Valley of the Kings tomb, "no one seeing, no one hearing"), and the vizier Rekhmire (Thutmose III and Amenhotep II, the workings of administration) supply individual, first-person detail unavailable in royal monuments. As funerary texts written to secure status in the afterlife, however, they are formulaic and self-promoting.

Temples (above all Karnak), the earliest tombs of the Valley of the Kings, monuments across Nubia and the Levant, and the royal mummies reburied by later priests in the Deir el-Bahri cache (DB320) are datable physical evidence that can check or supplement the written record. Yet archaeology is often mute without inscriptions to interpret it, and much has been robbed, reused or destroyed.

The fullest chronological frameworks come from much later: the Turin King List (a Ramesside-era papyrus recording kings and reign lengths), the Abydos and Karnak king-lists, and Manetho's Aegyptiaca (third century BC), whose division of Egyptian history into thirty dynasties is still used and whose account of the Hyksos survives in Josephus. All were compiled generations or centuries later, are fragmentary or ideologically selective (the Abydos list omits Hatshepsut and the Hyksos), and, in Manetho's case, survive only through disagreeing later quotations. They give a skeleton to be tested against contemporary monuments, not an independent authority.