The Emergence of the New Kingdom

After Ahmose’s spectacular success, unity and stability returned to Egypt. There was a very different atmosphere to the New Kingdom (1550-1069 Bc). While the Hyksos can be credited with opening Egypt to the wider world of the Ancient Near East, they were forever damned by the new rulers as foreign usurpers, whose crimes could be used to rally Egyptian nationalists. The state was militarized with, for the first time, a standing army. The energy of the destructive power of Seth, the ruling god of Avaris, was appropriated by the new regime and redirected at Egypt’s enemies. Thutmose I (1504-1492 Bc) reached the Euphrates and defeated the state of Mitanni in Syria. With control established over the cities of Palestine, local princes, supervised by Egyptian garrisons, were used to maintain the new empire intact.

As in previous dynasties, the kings of the New Kingdom also established firm control over Nubia. It is Thutmose I who is credited with the defeat of the Kingdom of Kush. ‘The Nubian bowmen fall by the sword and are thrown aside on their lands; their stench floods their valleys. . . the pieces cut from them are too much for the birds carrying off the prey to another place,’ the king records on a rock face near the victory. Egyptian rule was imposed further south than ever before, down to the Fourth Cataract and probably beyond. A frontier post was established at Napata, under the shadow of a table mountain, Gebel Barkal, which acted as a landmark for traders coming across the desert. For the first time the Egyptians could now directly control the trade routes with their rich harvest of exotic goods coming from

Central Africa. The Nubian gold mines were also worked so intensively that by the end of the New Kingdom they had become exhausted.

It took some time for the New Kingdom to build up its strength. Despite his military successes, Ahmose did not reopen the limestone quarries at Tura until late in his reign. His own buildings were all in mudbrick. His successor, Amenhotep I (1525-1504 Bc), portrayed himself as an aggressive warrior king (his Horus name was ‘Bull who conquers the lands’), but the evidence is of twenty years of peace and stability. All the usual signs of Egyptian prosperity now returned. New temples were built in Thebes and Nubia, and raw materials started to flow in to support a resurgence of artistic activity. Thebes was particularly honoured as the city from which the dynasty had sprung and the god Amun was glorified as its protective god. Amun’s temple at Thebes was wonderfully decorated with reliefs showing the king presenting offerings to the god and being presented in his turn with offerings from the priests.

Shortly afterwards the dynasty produced a rarity in Egyptian history, a ruling queen. There had been signs of the growing power of the queens early in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Both Ahmose’s mother and wife seem to have been formidable women who had cults dedicated to them at Thebes. Ahmose’s sister-wife Ahmose-Nefertari had been proclaimed God’s Wife of Amun. This gave her immediate control over the vast wealth of the god’s temple at Thebes. Hatshepsut, the niece of Amenhotep I and daughter of his successor Thutmose I, went further. Hatshepsut had married her half-brother, king Thutmose II. She had no sons, but Thutmose II had one by a concubine who, although still only a boy, succeeded as Thutmose III on the death of his father in 1479 BC. Hatshepsut was accepted as co-regent. Many early reliefs show her dutifully accompanying the young king as he fulfils the royal rituals but she was only biding her time. She soon took absolute power for herself, claiming that she was ruler by right as the heir of Thutmose I.

Every successful Egyptian ruler had to establish himself within a well-established ideology of kingship. For a woman this presented an almost insurmountable problem and Hatshepsut defined her image carefully. In some representations— sculptures, for instance—she was happy to present herself as female, and she took a female Horus name, ‘The She-Horus of fine gold. In more conventional settings, however, such as temple reliefs, she is shown as male, dressed in male clothes, even being shown with a regal beard! She also made great play of her divine ancestry, spelling out the details of her conception by Amun in the temple she built at Deir el-Bahri. There is an evocative description of how the god, in the disguise of Thutmose I, came to her mother’s bed and was aroused by her. ‘His love passed into her body; the palace was filled with divine fragrance.’ And so she was divinely conceived. In one inscription she even rewrites history to suggest that it is she who finally brought the rule of the hated Hyksos to an end and is now in a position to restore Egypt to its original purity. It is a fascinating example of the ways in which Egyptian rulers, particularly those who were outsiders, were able to define themselves within conventional ideologies of power.

Hatshepsut ruled for some fifteen years. It was a successful and stable reign and a peaceful one too, perhaps because the one section of Egyptian society Hatshepsut could not trust entirely was the army and so she never used it. She was the first of the New Kingdom rulers to have effective control over Middle Egypt, and a mass of new temples were built there. At Karnak, just north of Thebes, she created a vast new gateway to Amun’s temple that was embellished by six huge statues of herself. Hatshepsut was blessed with an outstanding chief official, Senenmut, a man of humble family who worked his way up to a position of far-reaching power. (Inevitably there were suggestions that he was the queen’s lover. Graffiti of the time have even been found showing a female pharaoh with a lover. The intimacy of his relationship with the royal family is confirmed by a charming statue, now in the British Museum, of him nursing the queen’s only child, her daughter by Thutmose II.)

Senenmut’s talents and interests were wide-ranging, as was typical for leading officials of the court. His tomb was decorated with astronomical symbols and contained the classics of Middle Kingdom religious literature. One of his greatest achievements, in his role of chief architect, was the mortuary temple he built for his queen at Deir el-Bahri, running along the northern side of the imposing tomb of Mentuhotep, founder of the Middle Kingdom. It is a dramatic site to visit. There was a causeway from the valley that, as it neared the main complex, was lined with a hundred sphinxes bearing the head of the queen. Then a succession of terraces supported by colonnades led up into the natural amphitheatre of the hillside with side chapels commemorating Thutmose I, Amun, and the goddess Hathor, the most popular of the Egyptian goddesses, protectress of kingship. Finally, a passage cut in the rock face led to an inner sanctuary. The complex echoes that of Mentuhotep but again it is unique and reinforces the theme of continual reinvention in the iconography of kingship.

Hatshepsut was not buried in the temple herself. She prepared two tombs for herself in the valleys behind. Her father, king Thutmose I, had been the first king to choose a desolate valley behind Deir el-Bahri for his own tomb (although there is also some evidence that Amenhotep I may have been buried there). Later to become celebrated as the Valley of the Kings, it was to be home to sixty-two tombs, nearly all of them of royalty. Hatshepsut’s choice was also a premonition, perhaps, that her body would not be left undisturbed. (For the Valley of the Kings see Nicholas Reeves and Richard Wilkinson, The Complete Valley of the Kings, London and New York, 1996.)

One of the most celebrated reliefs on Hatshepsut’s complex commemorates an expedition to the land of Punt, possibly staged as a publicity stunt to make up for her lack of military activity. (It certainly aroused enormous excitement at the time.) There are references to this mysterious land as early as the Old Kingdom. Punt was probably along the African shores of the southern Red Sea, although no one site has ever been identified. Hatshepsut’s reliefs suggest a journey through the Red Sea, and at Punt itself there are pictures of tree houses and tropical fauna (as well as the queen of Punt, depicted with a swollen and curved body). The fruits of these expeditions included aromatic plants, used for incense, ebony, electrum, and short-horned

Cattle, and it seemed that the traders lingered there for about three months at a time, perhaps waiting for favourable winds with which to return home. The exotic goods were used to glorify Amun, her ‘father, whose temples at Karnak received yet more embellishment.

Hatshepsut disappears from the record about 1458 bc. There is some suggestion that Senenmut turned against her and assured that Thutmose III achieved sole power. For a time Hatshepsut’s memory survived untarnished but some twenty years into Thutmose’s reign the hieroglyphs representing her name were systematically erased from every monument, even from the tips of obelisks. Once the precedent had been set an aggressive campaign of smashing her statues followed. This was a devastating fate for any Egyptian, as the survival of their inscribed name was one way in which an afterlife could be ensured. The comprehensive removal of Hatshepsut’s name may be a sign of the spite of Thutmose for his powerful stepmother, but probably the main objective was to restore an ordered and comprehensible past focused once again on male kingship.

In the reign of Thutmose III as sole ruler (1458-1425 bc) the New Kingdom was threatened with the loss of control in Asia. The kingdom of Mitanni, earlier defeated by Thutmose I, was now challenging Egypt for the control of the Levant. It attempted to undermine Egyptian rule by stirring up rivalries between the cities of Palestine. Thutmose led no less than seventeen campaigns in Asia, proudly recording their results on the walls of the temple of Amun at Karnak. One of his most famous battles was at Megiddo, where the king, against all professional advice (and this is something he stressed in order to maintain his status as a far-seeing monarch), took his armies through a difficult mountain pass to emerge behind his enemies and defeat them. The booty was magnificent and meticulously listed at Karnak, 894 chariots, now an accoutrement of every warrior, 200 suits of armour, 2,000 horses, and 25,000 other animals. With control over Palestine re-established, and maintained for the next 400 years, Thutmose took on Mitanni itself, even launching a successful crossing of the Euphrates. He also imposed his rule forcefully on Nubia. The land was now being exploited directly by Egyptian institutions, with the result that much of the indigenous culture was eradicated.

In royal mythology Thutmose was portrayed as one of the great kings of Egypt. He was far more than a successful conqueror. He had an acute sense of his place in history as the successor of a long line of Theban kings. A list of his ancestors was set up in the temple at Karnak and was treated with special reverence. He was also a man of culture and curiosity. He was an enthusiastic reader of ancient texts, and is believed to have composed literary works of his own. In contrast to his predecessors he was clearly impressed by Syrian culture and his three wives may have been Syrian themselves. Marbled glass from Syria becomes a popular luxury item. Thutmose even brought back examples of the flowers and plants of Syria, depicting them in a botanical scene on the temple wall at Karnak. His opposition to Mitanni encouraged Mitanni’s other enemies to send him gifts, lapis lazuli from Babylon, silver, gems, and wood from the Hittites. There is, in short, a much more relaxed

And positive approach to the outside world and the children of the elite were now taught how to read Babylonian cuneiform.

There is an interesting contrast between the imperial propaganda of the pharaohs— the name is now used for the first time—and the reality of their actions. A pharaoh had to incorporate an aura of invincibility into his image. Thutmose’s successor Amenhotep II (1427-1400 Bc) gloried in the role of war hero. His ebullient Horus name, ‘Powerful bull with great strength’, is echoed in legends which tell how he hunted lions on foot and killed Syrian princes with his own hands. However, much of this was for home consumption. In the twenty-seven years of Amenhotep’s reign, there were actually only two Syrian campaigns and gradually the pharaohs began to realize the importance of diplomatic solutions. Under Amenhotep’s successor Thut-mose IV (1400-1390 Bc) peace was made with Mitanni. The Mitannians were worried about the rise of the Hittite empire to the north, and they were quite content to hold northern Syria against the growing threat while allowing Egyptian rule to continue in Palestine. It is in Thutmose’s reign that one sees a shrinking in the number of military officials and the consolidation of civil administration. Peace was secured when Amenhotep III (1390-1352 Bc) married the daughter of the Mitannian king. The reality of international relations in this period can be seen in the Amarna letters (see Interlude 1).