Analyse the political, religious and social features of New Kingdom Egypt to the Amarna period

What this dot point is asking

The New Kingdom began when Ahmose I drove out the Hyksos rulers of the north and reunified Egypt around 1550 BCE, founding the Eighteenth Dynasty. Unlike earlier periods, the New Kingdom was outward-looking and militarised. Thutmose I campaigned into Nubia and as far as the Euphrates, and Thutmose III, often called the Napoleon of Egypt, won the Battle of Megiddo (around 1457 BCE) and led at least sixteen campaigns into Syria-Palestine. Empire brought tribute, gold, timber and prisoners, and it made the priesthood of the god Amun-Ra at Karnak enormously wealthy and powerful.

Kingship in the New Kingdom rested on the idea of maat, the cosmic order of truth, balance and justice that the pharaoh was bound to uphold. The pharaoh was both a political ruler and a religious figure, the son of Amun-Ra and the guarantor of order against chaos. Royal women could hold real power. Hatshepsut, who ruled as pharaoh around 1473 to 1458 BCE, had herself depicted in male royal dress and commissioned the mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri and a famous trading expedition to Punt, recorded on its walls.

The Amarna period is the most striking episode in the dot point. Amenhotep IV took the throne around 1352 BCE and, within a few years, changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning useful to the Aten. He promoted the Aten above all other gods, in what some scholars describe as the first sustained monotheism, though others call it monolatry or henotheism because Akhenaten himself remained divine. He built a new capital on virgin land at Akhetaten, the modern site of Tell el-Amarna, and his agents defaced the name of Amun across Egypt. Art changed too: the Amarna style shows the royal family with elongated skulls, full hips and intimate domestic scenes, including the famous bust of his queen Nefertiti, now in Berlin.

The Amarna revolution did not survive its author. The Amarna Letters, clay tablets in Akkadian found at the site, suggest that vassal states in Syria-Palestine pleaded in vain for Egyptian help, hinting that Akhenaten neglected the empire. After his death the boy-king Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun, restored the worship of Amun, and returned the court to Memphis and Thebes. Later kings such as Horemheb and the Ramesside pharaohs treated Akhenaten as a heretic and tried to erase him from the king lists. His near-disappearance from the record is exactly why his tomb-rich neighbour Tutankhamun, whose intact burial Howard Carter found in 1922, is so famous, while Akhenaten himself was almost forgotten.

For source work, this period is unusually rich: temple reliefs and inscriptions at Karnak and Deir el-Bahri, the boundary stelae of Akhetaten, the Amarna Letters, tomb paintings, and the objects from Tutankhamun's tomb. Each source type has limits. Royal inscriptions are propaganda that present the pharaoh as ever-victorious and never defeated, so the Battle of Kadesh under Ramesses II (around 1274 BCE) is recorded as a triumph despite being, at best, a draw with the Hittites.

Historians disagree about the period. Some, following Donald Redford, stress Akhenaten's intolerance and the political damage of his reign; others, such as Jan Assmann, focus on the theological significance of the Aten cult and its later echoes. For a TASC response you should treat the Amarna period as a case study in contestability, using the surviving evidence to weigh continuity in Egyptian kingship against the genuine break that Akhenaten represents.