History of the Ancient Near East · Part 7 · The age of the great kings · B2
Egypt’s New Kingdom: Hatshepsut and Akhenaten
Part 7 of History of the Ancient Near East: from about 1550 BCE, Egypt became an empire, from Nubia to Syria. A woman ruled as king, a pharaoh tried to replace all the gods with one, and their successors tried to erase both of them from history. Be supposed to, instead of / rather than, and the vocabulary of memory (erase, deface, restore), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, two rulers whom Egypt tried to forget: a woman who made herself king, and a king who abolished the gods.
Fourteen centuries before Cleopatra. And unlike Cleopatra, she wore a king’s false beard.
And the king who abolished the gods? What happened to him?
Around 1550 BCE, King Ahmose drove the Hyksos, rulers of Canaanite origin, out of northern Egypt. This began the New Kingdom, Egypt’s age of empire. Its kings, now called pharaohs, ruled Nubia in the south and Canaan and part of Syria in the north, and their capital, Thebes, became the richest city in the world. Its great god was Amun, and the priests of Amun at Karnak became immensely rich and powerful.
Two rulers of this age were later removed from the official lists of kings. Hatshepsut (ruled about 1479–1458 BCE) was a queen who took the full titles of a king. Akhenaten (about 1353–1336 BCE) closed the temples of the old gods and worshipped only the Aten, the disk of the sun, in a new capital at Amarna. His son, Tutankhamun, restored the old gods.
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