Evaluate the achievements of Ramesside Egypt and the causes of the New Kingdom's decline

What this dot point is asking

The Ramesside period covers the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, roughly 1292 to 1069 BCE. It opened after the Amarna disruption, when the army officer Horemheb and then the Ramessides restored traditional religion and stable government. The dynasty took its name from a line of kings called Ramesses, of whom the second is the most famous. Ramesses II, sometimes called Ramesses the Great, reigned for about sixty-six years (around 1279 to 1213 BCE) and built on a scale matched by few rulers in history.

Ramesses II is the central figure for this dot point. Early in his reign he fought the Hittite empire at the Battle of Kadesh, around 1274 BCE, in what was one of the largest chariot battles of the ancient world. His monuments present Kadesh as a personal triumph in which the king almost single-handedly saved his army, yet the battle was at best inconclusive. Around 1259 BCE he agreed a treaty with the Hittite king Hattusili III, one of the earliest surviving international peace treaties, copies of which exist in both Egyptian and Hittite versions. His building programme was vast: the rock temples at Abu Simbel, additions to Karnak and Luxor, the Ramesseum mortuary temple, and a new northern capital, Pi-Ramesses.

Decline is the analytical heart of the dot point, and it had several causes acting together. Externally, the Late Bronze Age collapse destroyed Egypt's trading partners and rivals, including the Hittites, cutting off resources and markets. Internally, the wealth and political power of the priesthood of Amun at Karnak grew until the High Priest of Amun rivalled the pharaoh. Economic strain showed in falling Nile floods, grain shortages and inflation. Strikingly, the workers building the royal tombs at Deir el-Medina staged what may be the first recorded labour strike in history, around 1157 BCE under Ramesses III, when their rations failed to arrive.

The late Twentieth Dynasty saw further signs of breakdown. Tomb robbery became widespread, and surviving papyri record official investigations into the plundering of royal tombs in the Theban necropolis. Royal authority fragmented, and by the end of the reign of Ramesses XI around 1069 BCE, real power in the south lay with the High Priests of Amun while the north was governed separately. This division marks the end of the New Kingdom and the start of the Third Intermediate Period, a time of weak central rule.

The evidence for this period is dominated by royal propaganda, which presents kings as eternally victorious, so historians cross-check it carefully. The Kadesh inscriptions, the Medinet Habu reliefs, the Harris Papyrus listing the donations of Ramesses III, the Deir el-Medina records and the tomb-robbery papyri together let scholars reconstruct both the official image and the messier reality. For a TASC answer, use Ramesses II to show the height of Ramesside power and Ramesses III to mark the turning point, then explain decline as the interaction of internal and external causes.