I've become curious about some of the major figures from the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, but I don't have more than a cursory knowledge of the political factions that were at play during the time of rulers like Hatshepsut.
Before I go off and do my own research I was hoping somebody could give me some context by explaining who the major power players were in that period Ancient Egypt. The major agendas, the natural allies and enemies, how state functionaries interacted, and how Egypt was governed as opposed to other comparable ancient societies; that sort of thing.
Thanks for your time.
Okay, this is a doozie but I'll take a crack at it. There were only two big main factions of political importance in Egypt at this time: the royal court and the priesthood, particularly the priests of Amun at the Temple of the Karnak. The reasons for this are both cultural and economic.
First, while the pharaoh is usually described as a god-king, it is a bit more complicated than that. The office of pharaoh was considered to be divine, the person of the king was still seen as a human. Therefore, the pharaoh needed the priesthood's support to maintain legitimacy. However, the pharaoh was also seen as the gods' representative on Earth and so was the de jure high priest of every temple to every god. So, throughout Egyptian history there was an almost constant tug of war between the court and the priesthood over who really bestowed legitimacy on the pharaoh. (check Ancient Egyptian Kingship edited by David O'Conner and David Silverman for a more thorough examination)
Regarding economics, it is important to understand that Egypt was an agrarian society with a barter economy, so land=food=money. The land was worked by the peasants who were overseen by nobles who took whatever the peasants grew aside from what they needed to survive. These nobles then paid taxes, recorded by professional scribal bureaucrats, by giving some of these crops to the king. The court used them to serve as a food deposit in case of famine and also to use them the same way a modern state uses revenue: to pay civic employees, construct works, maintain the army, etc. The conflict between the court and the priesthood came from the fact that the temples could also own land for their own use and much of their crop was tax free. It is ridiculously common in royal stela to see a royal edict granting a temple some land tax-free as a way to stay on their good side. This put the priesthood on an equal level of wealth with the king, meaning that if it wasn't for the divine role of the pharaoh, the temples could have operated completely independently of the court, and during the Third Intermediate Period that is exactly what happened. As far as the nobles, peasants, and civil servants, they really didn’t care about who had more political weight as long as they had enough to eat with maybe a little more to spend on goods.
During the 18th dynasty, the two factions were fairly balanced, maybe a little in favor of the priesthood. This was because the 18th dynasty was founded by Ahmose I, a Theban, when he expelled the foreign Hyksos from the delta and reunified Egypt, and ascribed his victory to the god of Thebes, Amun. His successors continued to honor Amun and claim that they ruled by Amun’s will, and they demonstrated this devotion by expanding Karnak , giving the priesthood a bit more leverage than the court. This devotion was kicked up to an 11 during the reign of Hatshepsut. As a woman and technically only co-regent for her young stepson/ nephew Thutmose III, she could not rely just on her position in the court as daughter of Thutmose I and Great Royal Wife to Thutmose II to justify claiming the throne. So, she played up her theological legitimacy, claiming to be the literal, not metaphorical, daughter of Amun, as described in a relief and text on her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, and commissioning a LOT of work for Karnak, far more than her predecessors. Now despite what the poorly made documentaries claim, the evidence suggests Thutmose III and Hatshepsut got along, so when Hatshepsut died, Thutmose III stepped in as sole pharaoh without any political turbulence and continued the close association Hatshepsut made with the priesthood of Amun (he did not erase her name until late in his reign, so while we are uncertain of his motivation, it probably was not a personal vendetta).
Thutmose III’s great-grandson, Amenhotep III, began pulling back from Karnak, seeking to gain more independence by promoting the view that he was a god and not dependent on Amun. His son, Amenhotep IV ran away with this strategy by trying to get rid of Amun and the other gods completely, eliminating the priesthood and setting up the royal family as the only intermediary between the human and divine worlds. He moved the capital away from Thebes, promoted the Aten, or visible disk of the sun, as the supreme god, and changed his name to Akhenaten. Akhenaten probably was not really a monotheist; his cultural revolution was a power grab to neuter the priesthood and establish the kingship as the only influential institution in Egypt. However, his radical changes were undone shortly after his death by the court in the name of the boy king Tutankhamun, the names of Akhenaten and his family were erased from history by one of Tut’s successors, the general Horemheb, and the status quo of uneasy tension between the king and the priesthood was restored. This situation remained largely unchanged for two more centuries in the 19th and 20th Dynasties until the High Priest of Amun, Herihor, established a de facto theocracy in Upper Egypt and the pharaoh became a figurehead for a long time.