Anyway, after all this conquering and being conquered, Egypt eventually emerged from its geographically imposed isolationism and... Can we cue the New Kingdom graphic? There it is. New Kingdom Egypt continued this military expansion, but it looked more like an empire, particularly when they headed south and took over land in an attempt to find gold and slaves. Probably the most expansive of the New Kingdom pharaohs was Hatshepsut, a woman who ruled Egypt for about 22 years and who expanded Egypt not through military might, but through trade. But most New Kingdom pharaohs, being dudes, focused on military expansion, which brought Egypt into conflicts with the Assyrians, who you'll remember from last week, and then the Persians, and then Alexander the Great, and finally the Romans. On the whole, Egypt probably would have been better off enjoying its geographical isolation and not trying to conquer new territory, but all of Egypt's friends had jumped off a bridge, so... One last thing about the New Kingdom, there was this crazy New Kingdom pharaoh named Akhenaten who tried to invent a new god for Egypt, Aten. Akhenaten was kind of the Kim Jong-il of ancient Egypt, like he had this feared police force and this big cult of personality and also he was a nutjob.