Ancient Egypt at the height of the New Kingdom

By around 1250 BCE, during the reign of Ramesses II, Egypt was at the height of its New Kingdom power - a superpower of the Late Bronze Age reaching from the Nile Delta deep into Nubia and contesting the Levant with the Hittite Empire. Its wealth flowed from the predictable flooding of the Nile, which made the valley one of the most productive farmlands on Earth.

Egyptian civilisation had by then already lasted longer than the time separating us from Ramesses today. Drag the ChronoAtlas timeline to place Egypt in its wider ancient world, alongside the Hittites, Assyria and Mycenaean Greece.

Key facts

• The Battle of Kadesh (c. 1274 BCE) against the Hittites produced the earliest surviving peace treaty in history.
• Ramesses II reigned for around 66 years and left more monuments than any other pharaoh.
• The Nile's annual flood deposited fertile silt that underpinned three thousand years of Egyptian statehood.
• The New Kingdom was the age of the Valley of the Kings and pharaohs like Hatshepsut, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun.