Dr. Campbell Price

an Egyptian foreign influence in the Levant.

And it is that, ultimately, that the dynasty of Ramses II seeks to re-establish.

Well, we're so dependent on official proclamations, which are given a flavour, shall we say, if we're being positivist, that give some kind of flavour, but they don't recount the detail anything like the way a historian would want today.

But you're right that those cuneiform tablets, the Amarna letters, offer a really fascinating insight because these are

one-on-one discussions this is the queen of egypt writes or the king of egypt writes to their opposite number so you you get a sense of the geopolitics of the time but it's shrouded in decorum what is appropriate to say in certain contexts and we only really have one side of the of the discussion

Yeah.

So purely in terms of geographical extent, and again, I emphasize, I wouldn't think of it as an empire like the Roman Empire or the British Empire, but it's an area of influence.

Egypt itself, it should always be stressed, is the perfect country.

So Egypt, bordered naturally by the Mediterranean, by the deserts, by the cataracts to the south of Aswan,

is ideal.

Egypt doesn't need to expand.

It's already perfect, set by the gods.

But to the north, in the reign of Thutmose III, there's areas of influence up to the Euphrates.

So it's a big stretch of up into what is now modern Syria and Iraq, to the south, deep into what is now Sudan.

To the west, of course, there's Libya.

And we'll come back to Libya because Ramesses really makes a point of that as well.

And so these are the kind of the natural extents of...

ancient Egyptian exploitation.

So they want stuff.

They're not interested really in everyone believing in the Egyptian way of life.