Dr. Campbell Price

Yes, there are elite key people that pay homage to the king and send tribute, but they want stuff.

They want materials.

They want gold.

They want access to metals, to exotic products, to people.

There's exploitation of people, of course.

There are enslaved people in all of this.

but maybe not quite of the character that maybe we've been led to think in scriptural sources.

Yeah, so if we think, so Thutmose is in the 1400s, Akhenaten is the mid-1300s, so 60, 70, 80 years later.

there is a lot of ping-ponging goes on between... So if you're a kind of small state in the south of modern Syria, say,

and you've got the Egyptians who claim control or some kind of nominal control of your land and want you to send tribute, that's fine if they come and they have a military sortie and they beat you up.

But then when the Egyptians withdraw back to their capital Memphis, this will be important later,

then they're quite far away from the south of Syria.

Memphis is almost the northern capital as well, isn't it?

Yeah, that's the apex of the delta, where the delta meets the valley in Egypt.

But then if you've got the Hittites, who are the north of Syria, you've got peoples to what is now modern Turkey, you've got the Assyrians,

more towards the west, when they come and threaten you, you'll immediately change loyalty to the person, the big bad wolf that's closer to you.

So the Egyptians always had a problem about exerting influence from so far away and maybe that led to a shift in the notional capital which was affected by the 19th dynasty.

Yes, there's definitely a sense of the expansion and the kind of awakening of other powers.

But you're right to say that by the reign of Amenhotep III...

so again, 1300s, there is this sense of the international court.