New Kingdom of Egypt

The New Kingdom opens with the expulsion of the Hyksos rulers of the Delta by Ahmose I around 1550 BCE, founding the Eighteenth Dynasty, and closes around 1077 BCE with the end of the Twentieth Dynasty and the onset of the Third Intermediate Period's political fragmentation. Egypt's rulers, especially Thutmose III, extended military campaigns deep into the Levant and south into Nubia, building an empire whose tribute funded the great temple complexes of Karnak and Luxor and made Amun, the state god, extraordinarily wealthy through his priesthood at Thebes.

The dynasty's most singular episode is the reign of Akhenaten, formerly Amenhotep IV, who around 1353 BCE closed the traditional temples, suppressed the cult of Amun by name, and elevated the Aten, the visible solar disc, as the sole legitimate object of worship, relocating the capital to a new city, Akhetaten, at modern Amarna. His son, restored to the traditional religion as Tutankhamun, and the kings who followed reversed the Amarna reforms, reopened the old temples and erased Akhenaten's name from later king lists, though the episode remains one of the most studied religious innovations of the ancient world precisely because it was so quickly and thoroughly undone. Ramesses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty presided over the New Kingdom's last great building age, and the period ends amid Libyan and Sea Peoples incursions and the slow decline of central authority under the later Ramesside kings.

State religion in the New Kingdom centered on Amun-Ra, a fusion of the originally local Theban god Amun with the ancient solar god Ra, worshipped at the vast Karnak temple complex, whose priesthood accumulated land, gold and political influence on a scale that made it a rival to royal authority by the dynasty's end. Karnak's halls and pylons were extended by successive kings across the whole period, and its annual Opet Festival, in which Amun's image traveled by river to Luxor Temple, was among the empire's great state occasions.

The Book of the Dead, more properly the Book of Going Forth by Day, became the standard funerary text of the period, a further evolution of the Old Kingdom's Pyramid Texts and the Middle Kingdom's Coffin Texts, now written on papyrus scrolls that could be purchased, partly personalized and placed in the coffin of anyone who could afford a copy, including the celebrated judgment scene in which the deceased's heart is weighed against the feather of Maat. Akhenaten's Atenist reform stands against this mainstream as a deliberate rupture, replacing the entire pantheon and its afterlife literature with a solar theology focused on light itself rather than a personified sun god, and its abrupt reversal after his death illustrates how firmly Amun's cult, the empire's wealth and the Book of the Dead's promises had become fixed in New Kingdom religious life. Miriam Lichtheim's translations of New Kingdom literature and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald Redford, remain standard references for the period's texts and theology.