The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine Page B

prior to the start of the New Kingdom the pharaohs generally refrained from overtly expansionist policies. The reasons for the demise of the Middle Kingdom are not known, but by the 1600s BCE most of Middle and Lower Egypt was underthe rule of theHyksos, foreigners likely of Syro-Canaanite origin.Murals atAvaris, the Hyksos capital in the northwest delta, are stylistically similar to those found on Crete andThera and hint at the possibility of a Cretan expatriate community there, too.
    The Hyksos seem to have adapted rather than uprooted Egyptian conventions, but they remained an alien elite distinct from native rulers who continued to control Upper Egypt from Thebes. In the 1560s BCE ,King Kamose mounted a riverine campaign to wrest Avaris from the Hyksos. His soldiers used their vessels as mobile bases from which they conducted operations ashore rather than for ship-to-ship operations. One incentive for overthrowing the Hyksos was to eliminate them as middlemen in Upper Egypt’s trade with the Levant. In an account of his victorious campaign, Kamose boasts “I have not left a plank under the hundreds of ships of newcedar, filled with gold, lapis lazuli, silver, turquoise, and countless battle-axes of metal.… I seized them all. I did not leave a thing of Avaris, because it is empty, with the Asiatic vanished.” The narrative suggests a complete rout of the enemy, but credit for the final ouster of the Hyksos goes to Kamose’s successor,Ahmose, the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom.
    Following the sack of Avaris, the Egyptians pursued the Hyksos into Canaan, a move that signaled a deeper engagement in the region than they had attempted previously. The Near East was undergoing political upheaval thanks also to the westward expansion of the Mitanni kingdom from their homeland in northernMesopotamia. Ahmose and his successors remained committed to the region, and in the course of seventeen campaignsThutmose III extended Egyptian control as far as southern Syria. The military expeditions to and administration of this territory depended on Egypt’s control of Levantineports includingByblos, Ulazza, and Ardata (just south of Tripoli,Lebanon), where Thutmose stockpiled matériel for his Syrian campaign. According totheBarkal Stela, “Now every harbor His Majesty came to was supplied with fine bread, various breads, oil, incense, wine, honey, fr[uit]…more numerous than anything, beyond the comprehension of His Majesty’s army—and that’s no exaggeration!” On his eighth campaign, Thutmose sailed his army to Byblos, whose stocks of shipbuilding timber would prove invaluable to the next phase of his expedition against the Mitanni. The invasion was largely unopposed until it approached theEuphrates, where the Egyptians bested the Mitanni in several engagements. When the Mitanni withdrew east of the river, Thutmose launched his prefabricated vessels into the river and proceeded downstream, destroying towns and villages as he went and driving the Mitanni to seek refuge in caves. In bringing the ships up from the coast, the Egyptians drew on their long experience of transporting ships from theNile to the Red Sea, a significantly longer distance across far more inhospitable terrain.
    At the same time that the Thebans were advancing against the Hyksos in the north, they were also campaigning against thekingdom of Kush, which had expanded northward fromNubia. Egypt’s southern boundary had moved back and forth between the First and Second Cataracts since theOld Kingdom, but the New Kingdom pharaohs’ conquest of Kush was remarkable for its extent and duration. The Barkal Stela recounting Thutmose III’s exploits in Syria was erected atNapata, twenty kilometers downstream from the Fourth Cataract, which remained Egypt’s southern boundary for four hundred years. The kingdom was now at the height of its imperial reach, which extended 2,200 kilometers from Napata toUgarit (Ras Shamra, Syria). The