The New Kingdom was Egypt at its richest and most powerful. Having learned chariot warfare from the Hyksos era, its kings turned outward. For the first time Egypt became an empire, reaching from Nubia in the south to Syria in the north, and Thebes, home of the god Amun, became its religious capital.

An empire in two directions

Thutmose I led armies to the Euphrates and deep into Nubia. Egypt now governed Nubia directly. A viceroy titled King's Son of Kush ran Nubia for the crown, overseeing gold mines that made Egypt the richest power of its age. In the Levant, Egypt worked differently: local city rulers kept their thrones as vassals, sent tribute and sometimes sent their sons to be raised at the Egyptian court, part education and part hostage taking.

Hatshepsut

Thutmose II died young, leaving a small son, Thutmose III, and a widow, Hatshepsut, who was also his half sister. She acted as regent and then, within a few years, did something remarkable. Hatshepsut took the full titles of a king and was often shown with a king's kilt and false beard. She ruled for about twenty years, from roughly 1479 to 1458 BC, with Thutmose III as her junior co-ruler. Her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, cut into the cliffs of western Thebes, records her proudest achievement: a trading expedition to Punt, a land of incense and gold probably on the southern Red Sea coast, which brought back myrrh trees, ebony and exotic animals.

Later, many of her images were chiseled away and her name dropped from king lists. Popular accounts once blamed a vengeful stepson. But the destruction began only some twenty years after her death, late in Thutmose III's reign, which suggests a political motive, perhaps securing the succession for his own son, rather than personal hatred. Why a female king was eventually written out remains debated.

Thutmose III and Megiddo

Thutmose III became one of Egypt's great soldier kings, leading around seventeen campaigns. In his first, about 1457 BC, he faced a coalition of Canaanite and Syrian rulers at Megiddo. Against his officers' advice, he took a narrow pass and surprised the enemy, then besieged the city for months. His annals, carved on the walls of the Karnak temple, give the earliest detailed account of a battle that survives.

The Amarna letters

Under Amenhotep III, Egypt enjoyed peace and enormous wealth. Kings of Babylon, Mitanni, Assyria and the Hittites wrote to Pharaoh as "brother," asking for gold and arranging royal marriages. We know this because of a find in 1887 at Amarna: about 380 clay tablets. The Amarna letters were written mostly in Akkadian cuneiform, the shared diplomatic language of the age, not in Egyptian. They show an international system of great powers with its own etiquette, along with anxious letters from Levantine vassals begging Egypt for troops.

Akhenaten

Amenhotep III's son came to the throne as Amenhotep IV and within a few years changed his name to Akhenaten. Akhenaten raised the Aten, the disk of the sun, above all other gods and closed or neglected the temples of Amun. He built a new capital, Akhetaten, at the site now called Amarna, on empty ground in Middle Egypt. Art changed too: the king, his queen Nefertiti and their daughters appear in relaxed family scenes, with long faces, narrow chins and full hips. A hymn to the Aten, inscribed in a courtier's tomb, praises the sun's care for every land and creature; in James Henry Breasted's translation of 1905 it exclaims, "How manifold are thy works!"

Was this the first monotheism? Some scholars say yes, pointing to the hacking out of Amun's name and the rejection of other gods. Others answer that Akhenaten worshipped the Aten together with himself and the royal family, through whom ordinary people were to approach the god, and that many people kept their household gods in private. It may be safest to call it a radical, top-down religious reform whose closest heirs are debated.

Restoration

The reform barely outlived its founder. Within a few years of his death, a boy king named Tutankhaten became Tutankhamun, and Tutankhamun's reign restored the old gods and the temples of Amun. Amarna was abandoned, and later kings left Akhenaten out of the king lists, calling him, in one record, "that enemy." Tutankhamun himself was a minor king, famous only because Howard Carter found his nearly intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922.

Worked example: two kings, two erasures

Compare the fates of Hatshepsut and Akhenaten. Both were cut out of official memory, but for different reasons. Hatshepsut's erasure came late and was partial; her temple still stood, and it seems aimed at the line of succession. Akhenaten's erasure came from a broad reaction against his religious program, and his city was taken apart for building stone. In both cases historians rebuilt the story from what the erasers missed: blocks reused in later buildings, letters left in an abandoned office, a tomb hidden under later debris. The lesson for any reader of official history is that silence in a record is itself evidence, and it usually serves someone.