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.