New Kingdom Egypt to Tuthmosis III: WACE Year 12 Ancient History

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to study Egyptian society across the early Eighteenth Dynasty, from the family of Tetisheri who helped drive out the Hyksos, through the reign of Hatshepsut, to the empire-builder Tuthmosis III, with a particular emphasis on the nature and exercise of power and authority. You need to explain how Egypt was reunified, how kingship and the role of women in the royal family worked, and how the empire was organised. The Egypt option is examined through source analysis and essays in the external paper, so you must name and evaluate evidence such as the Kamose stelae, the tomb of Ahmose son of Ibana, and the reliefs of Deir el-Bahari.

The period opens with Egypt divided. During the Second Intermediate Period, the Hyksos, foreign rulers of the Fifteenth Dynasty, controlled the north from Avaris while the native Theban Seventeenth Dynasty held the south. The royal women of Thebes were central to the recovery. Queen Tetisheri, honoured by her grandson Ahmose with a memorial stela and a chapel at Abydos, became the matriarch of the liberating line, and her descendants Ahhotep and Ahmose-Nefertari held unusual political and religious authority. This prominence of royal women, including the office of God's Wife of Amun, is a key theme of the unit.

The wars of liberation are vividly recorded. The two Kamose stelae, set up by the Theban king Kamose, describe his campaign north against the Hyksos ruler Apophis and reveal the ideology of reunification. The autobiography inscribed in the tomb of Ahmose son of Ibana at el-Kab is the central eyewitness source for the final expulsion: this soldier served under Ahmose I at the siege of Avaris and the capture of Sharuhen in Palestine, and his account is prized because it comes from a participant, though it is shaped to glorify both king and subject.

Ahmose I (reigned about 1550 to 1525 BC) completed the expulsion and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty, the start of the New Kingdom. His successors Amenhotep I and Tuthmosis I extended Egyptian power, with Tuthmosis I campaigning as far as the Euphrates and deep into Nubia. The state that emerged was militarised and imperial, with a professional army, chariotry adopted from the Hyksos, and a growing administration. The cult of Amun-Re at Karnak in Thebes became the religious centre of the empire, and the kings poured booty and tribute into the god's temples, binding throne and priesthood together.

Hatshepsut is the most studied figure of the unit. Initially regent for her young stepson Tuthmosis III, she took the full titulary of a pharaoh around 1473 BC and ruled for about two decades. Her reign emphasised legitimacy, trade and building rather than conquest. The reliefs of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari record the famous trading expedition to Punt, depicting the exotic goods, incense trees and the queen of Punt, and present her divine birth as the daughter of Amun. Her chief official Senenmut, her obelisks at Karnak, and the inscription at the Speos Artemidos are further key sources. After her death, her images and names were attacked in a programme of erasure, traditionally blamed on Tuthmosis III, though scholars now date much of it later in his reign and read it as dynastic rather than personal revenge.

Tuthmosis III (sole reign about 1458 to 1425 BC) became Egypt's greatest military pharaoh. The Annals carved on the walls of Karnak, drawn from daily campaign records, describe at least seventeen campaigns into Syria-Palestine. The decisive Battle of Megiddo, fought against a coalition led by the ruler of Kadesh, opened with Tuthmosis taking a daring narrow pass and ended in a seven-month siege and rich plunder. His empire was held by garrisons, by taking the children of foreign princes to Egypt as hostages and Egyptianised vassals, and by a flow of tribute that enriched Amun. He thus embodies the imperial kingship the whole period builds towards.

Historiographically, the Egypt option demands awareness of the nature of the evidence. Royal inscriptions are propaganda, not neutral history: the Kamose stelae and the Annals glorify the king, and the Punt reliefs serve Hatshepsut's legitimacy. Modern scholars such as Joyce Tyldesley on Hatshepsut and Donald Redford on Tuthmosis III debate motives that the ancient sources never state. Reconstructing chronology also relies on regnal years, the Turin King List and astronomical dating, all of which carry uncertainty reflected in the approximate dates used here.