Egypt's New Kingdom begins

Around 1550 BCE a Theban king named Ahmose I finished a war of liberation. For about a century northern Egypt had been ruled by the Hyksos, foreign rulers of Canaanite origin whose capital Avaris lay in the Nile Delta, while Thebes in the south held out under its own kings and Nubia in the far south was independent. Ahmose took Avaris, chased the Hyksos into Canaan, and reunited the country. He founded the 18th dynasty and with it the New Kingdom, which lasted until about 1070 BCE.¹³

The New Kingdom grew from the long tradition of a unified Egyptian state that began when Egypt was first united around 3100 BCE, but also from the shock of the Hyksos period. The Hyksos had brought bronze weapons, the composite bow and the horse-drawn chariot, which the Thebans adopted and used against them. Ahmose's father and brother, Seqenenre Tao and Kamose, had already fought the Hyksos, and Ahmose finished the job. Having seen what foreigners could do, Egypt's kings were no longer content to guard the Nile alone.³

The result was an empire. Pharaohs pushed into Nubia and into Canaan and Syria. Thutmose III won the Battle of Megiddo around 1457 BCE and ruled lands reaching toward the Euphrates. Hatshepsut sent a trading expedition to Punt, Akhenaten tried a religious revolution, and Tutankhamun's tomb survived to dazzle the modern world. Ramesses II fought the Hittites at Kadesh around 1274 BCE and later made a treaty with them. Thebes, with its temples at Karnak and Luxor and the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings, became the religious capital. The word pharaoh, meaning 'great house', began to be used for the king in this age.¹²