INTRODUCTION

The defeat of the Hyksos and the Kerma kingdom in the early New Kingdom led to greatly expanded Egyptian control of foreign regions to the northeast and farther south - through warfare. The 18th and 19th Dynasties were the age of Egypt’s empire, and in Nubia temple towns were founded as far upstream as the Fourth Cataract. It was a cosmopolitan age with much trade and exchange between the major states in the Near East and Aegean, and opulence is apparent, especially in royal and elite burials in western Thebes. The pyramid as a royal tomb disappeared by the New Kingdom, however, and kings were buried in hidden rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

Beginning in the 18th Dynasty cult temples were built mainly in stone (and added onto). A major beneficiary of Egyptian conquests was the Temple of Amen-Ra at Karnak. Huge royal mortuary temples were also built across the river in western Thebes.

The well-preserved town at Deir el-Medina, for workers in the royal tombs and their families, has provided important settlement data, as has Akhenaten’s briefly occupied capital at Tell el-Amarna. Akhenaten’s focus on the cult of the god Aten produced the so-called Amarna revolution, but his wide-ranging reforms scarcely outlived his reign. His successor, Tutankhamen, abandoned Amarna and was buried in Thebes, in a small but lavishly furnished tomb.

Although the great pharaoh Rameses II fought the Hittites, the other superpower of the time, at Qadesh in Syria, and later concluded a peace treaty with them, in the 20th Dynasty Egypt lost its empire in southwest Asia. The 20th-Dynasty kings, all but one of whom were named Rameses, continued to be buried in the Valley of the Kings, but at the end of this dynasty most of the Theban royal tombs were robbed. The New Kingdom was succeeded by a dynasty of kings of uncertain ancestry ruling at Tanis in the northeastern Delta, and a kind of theocratic state at Thebes.

An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, Second Edition. Kathryn A. Bard. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.