"New Kingdom" Egyptian army in 20mm for Impetus rules

The nostalgia wave continues with the revamping of old and some new builds for this Atlantic force. Atlantic was an amazing Italian brand from the 70´s. Most of its HO stuff was around 1/87th scale like the 20th century figures and Far-West, with vehicles and landing craft sitting somewhere from 1/144 to 1/60! In this childhood days whatever fish that came to the net was eagerly played with and I spent hours around all their stuff. But a different story has to be told about their ancient range - Egyptian, Trojans, Greeks and Romans - were beautiful 1/72nd scale models even if with poetic and Hollywoodized details. 

The brand then decided to move to Lebanon and was caught in the middle of the Israeli invasion of 1982 and many of its moulds were never seen again. Nexus came after and continued for a few years with the survivors but somehow Atlantic - like Atlantida - was lost forever.  

I used three boxes of infantry for this host. The Atlantic boxes were not only cheap and made of excellent plastic (no broken figures after 40 years) but also had more than 60 figures inside. This Egyptian set is great for Old and Middle Kingdom as no figure has armour with nice shields and a correct choice of weapons. The only problem here is the small number of archers (one pose only) which should be half of the total infantry. The standards were made from GreenStuff modelled into broom sticks and glued to the a relatively immovable pose. I left the figures with the Pharaoh´s Deshret crown like that and they became officers which is not correct but looks good. In the old Egyptian armies the officers fought from the back of the phalanx and I did the same here. 

The archers came from the infantry box and the three poses of archers from the chariot box. Some of the figures are the Pharaoh from the chariot but his head was modelled in order to have only hair without the Pschent Pharaonic headdress. You can´t get many archers unfortunately from Atlantic and other brands will have to come to rescue in the future like Zvezda and Caesar. 

The only reason I can call it a "New Kingdom" army is because of the chariots. These were introduced by the Hyksos and thus this new weapon can only be used by New Kingdom Egyptians. The chariots were usually accompanied by skirmishers as you can see here - probably very fast runners!! So here Atlantic mixed different periods of Egypt history but I have some plans to upgrade the last few boxes of Atlantic Egyptian (old/middle) infantry ...

This chariot is meant to be Ramesses II at Khadesh (obviously!) fighting the Hittites  and for that the golden armour of Ramesses was painted in his torso. In fact this gave me the idea how to place linen protection in the Atlantic Egyptian infantry converting them to New Kingdom Egyptians... damn, I just unveiled the "plans to upgrade" the Egyptian infantry, you big mouth!!

Kept for some 40 years in my basement was the Egyptian boats box. Up until last week I was convinced that this box had standard bearers and rowers inside due to the beautiful box artwork but in fact the standard bearers are the one from the Pharaohs´ court box and rowers are conversions from infantry positions. 

The rowers are conversions from the figure holding the small Khopesh. Arms were bent to position and a piece of plastic sprue gave the rows. 

This kind of cover, even if with some rather strange boats, was making us dream when we were kids and I think they contributed for my love for history.  And her you have the "fake" rowers and standard beares (left boat) not present on the box. 

This Sphinx was also waiting painting and basing for a few decades and finally it was done. Its funny how Atlantic portrayed the Sphinx in stone color while it was found more recently that its was painted as it had some vestiges of paint in the back of the ears. 

This was the full series of Atlantic Egyptians of which you can see four in this post (infantry, chariots, boats and the Sphinx). I still don´t have the court, the Pharaohs' boat and the temple and I hope to find them one day at reasonable prices mainly for the sake of nostalgia. Well, while there is life there is hope! 

Next: Impetus rebased Saxons.