The New Kingdom 1550 BC - 1070 BC
I'll bet you can
name a Pharaoh from this period. If you said Rameses the
Great or Tutankhamun, you would be correct. These were
the Kings who were buried in the Valley of the Kings at
Luxor. And the Capital of Egypt was at Luxor.
Let's trace the Pharaohs backwards from Rameses the
Great.
Rameses
the Great (Rameses II) was
the son of Seti I. They
are shown together in this relief from Seti's Mortuary
Temple at Abydos.
Seti I was the son of a General, Rameses I, who
established a Dynasty after a period where several minor
rulers held power after the death of Tutankhamun.
Tutankamun came to be Pharaoh when his famous brother Akhenaten failed to establish a new state religion
with Aten, the sun god as the principal god. When
Tutankamun was Pharaoh, the Great Pyramids at Giza were
already a thousand years old.
The Early New Kingdom Pharaohs included a female
Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. She
built the amazing Temple at Deir El Bahri. You can read her biography.Karnak, the
largest religious complex in the world, was built during
this time. The Priests of the god Amun were the most
powerful, although there were many other gods that were
worshiped. Each Pharaoh added to Karnak. Hatshepsut
dedicated two obelisks in Karnak, as show in this relief commemorating that addition.
These New Kingdom Pharaohs recaptured Egypt from the
foreign rule of the Hyksos who swept out of the Middle
East in their war chariots
which the Egyptians had never seen before.
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