The New Kingdom is regularly referred to as Egypt’s imperial age. It is debatable whether the term “empire” can be imported uncritically into the second millennium
BC, but the term has its uses all the same. The Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty staged major campaigns into the Sudan and western Asia, exacted tribute, claimed the right to replace rulers with others of their own choosing, and, in the case of the Sudan, introduced colonies and state-of-the-art agriculture (W. Adams 1977; Kemp 1978). Several of the New Kingdom temple sites in the latter country are the equals of many in Egypt. In the Near East Egyptian aims were to control the coast and its ports, but Egyptian armies twice crossed the Euphrates in Syria to overawe the power of Mitanni, which lay beyond.
The impetus for this aggression came from the fact that Egypt had fallen under the control of a Near Eastern people known conventionally as the Hyksos. These were eventually driven from the country, again by princes from the city of Thebes, but the memory of this episode left its mark upon Egyptian strategy. The culmination of Egyptian military success came with the battle of Megiddo (c.1450 bc), won by Pharaoh Tuthmosis III against a formidable Syrian coalition. This is the first battle in history which can be reconstructed (Cline 2000: 15-24). The enemy, Mitanni, was later to fall victim to the Hittites, who were to prove far less amenable. Some of northern Syria was lost to the Hittites, and the two powers eventually met at Qadesh on the river Orontes (c.1275 bc), where the young and boastful Ramesses II came near to losing the day until he was saved by last-minute reinforcements from the coast (Murnane 1990).
One of the most striking personalities from the ancient world is Hatshepsut, kinswoman of Tuthmosis III who effectively seized the throne from him and held it for 22 years. On her obelisks at Karnak, the seat of the Theban god Amun who was the patron of empire, she records how the creator god made her privy to his secrets before the creation of the universe itself. Modesty was not an affectation to which Hatshepsut felt the need to succumb:
Those who shall see my monument in future years, and shall speak of what I have done, beware lest you say, “I know not, I know not how this has been done, fashioning a mountain of gold like something self-created” . . . Nor shall he who hears this say it was a boast, but rather, “How like her this is, how worthy of her father.”
In the eyes of history, Hatshepsut describes herself as “the fine gold of kings,” and the very language of inscriptions was altered to reflect her gender (Bryan in I. Shaw 2000: 237-43; Ray 2001: 40-59).
The cult of Amun of Thebes attracted envy as well as adulation, and its older rival, the sun worship centered on Heliopolis, staged an increasing comeback. There are clear signs of this in the reign of Tuthmosis IV and his son Amenophis III (c.1390-1352 bc). This culminated in the remarkable reign of Akhenaten, in which the worship of Amun was first marginalized and then proscribed. Akhenaten’s introduction of a sole creator god has been the subject of libraries of research since the 1880s, and this shows no signs of abating (bibliography in G. Martin 1991; comparative study by Montserrat 2000 and many others, including a good summary by van Dijk in I. Shaw 2000: 272-94). This religious revolution was mirrored in literature and art, and may have left traces in the Hebrew Psalm 104 (Lichtheim 1973-80 II: 96-100; Rodd 2001). A unique find from the new capital is the diplomatic archives, written in Babylonian cuneiform by the various rulers of cities which were loyal to Egypt, who were coming under attack for this loyalty (Moran 1992).
The revolution of Akhenaten was short lived, and the following two dynasties, the Nineteenth and Twentieth, are normally known as the Ramesside period (c.1295-1069 Bc). For some reason, the bulk of papyri from the New Kingdom, both documentary and literary, date to this period. Egypt, like other Near Eastern states, needed to train scribes for its bureaucracy, and several collections of exercises survive showing pupils going through stages of their education and being corrected or reprimanded by teachers (Caminos 1954; Johnson 1994). One of the many distractions which pupils may have encountered is the existence of erotic and romantic poetry. Examples of this poetry, which was collected in ways that resemble a song cycle, are known, and the influence on the Biblical Song of Songs has often been noted (Fox 1985).
Literary tales abound from this period, many of which contain elements which surface in the folklore of other cultures, ancient and modern (Lichtheim 1973-80 II: 197-230). The influence of Syria and the Levant is noticeable, both in the geographical settings of many of the tales and in loanwords, which entered New Kingdom Egyptian in considerable quantities (Hoch 1994). The masterpiece of this collection is the Voyage of Wenamun, a text which begins like a documentary report on a mission to fetch cedar wood from Lebanon, but which rapidly turns into a set of maritime adventures which would not be out of place in Homer’s Odyssey (Lichtheim 1973-80 II: 224-30). Here is the atmospheric way in which the hero first meets the ruler of Byblos:
He took me up, while the [statue of] the god was resting in its tent by the shore of the sea. I found the ruler sitting in his upper room, with his back turned to a window, and the waves of the great Syrian sea were beating behind his head.
Then there is the reply of the same ruler to a monologue about civilization which Wenamun has given him as a substitute for ready cash (his own having been stolen):
Amun thunders in the sky, but only when he has placed the storm god there beside him. And Amun created all the lands of the earth, but only after he had created the land of Egypt, where you came from the other day. And culture came from there to end up in the place where I am, and wisdom likewise. So why these pointless journeyings you are busy with,?
Wenamun is a masterpiece of irony, suspenseful timing, and keen sense of place.
Official documents are more common from the New Kingdom than in previous periods. Tomb records are fuller, including legal texts such as the inscription of Mose (Gaballa 1977) and a series of didactic texts covering questions such as the ethics of political conduct (most recently Hagen 2005). The walls of colossal temples needed to be covered with inscriptions, although these are of varying degrees of historical value. A remarkable document from near the end of the New Kingdom is the Great
Papyrus Harris, which lists the achievements of Ramesses III and outlines the turbulent history which preceded him (Grandet 1994).
Probably the most informative site from ancient Egypt is the workman’s village of Deir el Medineh, on the west bank at Thebes. This has yielded not only houses and furniture, but an entire archive covering work diaries, economic transactions, complaints about corruption, an account of a series of strikes and the official response to them, letters, literary tales, and a list of Pharaohs, unfortunately fragmentary, with the precise lengths of their reigns. A list of a rival workman’s extramarital affairs survives, drawn up as part of a petition to the authorities. Work on this wealth of documents still continues ((dernyl 1973; McDowell 1990; Meskell 2002, and Janssen 1975).
World History
