Hyksos

“ But we are without any clue as to their real name, language, or origin. The writers of classical times were unable to come to an agreement on these questions: some confounded the Hyksôs with the Phoenicians, others regarded them as Arabs.* Modern scholars have put forward at least a dozen contradictory hypotheses on the matter. The Hyksôs have been asserted to have been Canaanites, Elamites, Hittites, Accadians, Scythians. The last opinion found great favour with the learned, as long as they could believe that the sphinxes discovered by Mariette represented Apôphis or one of his predecessors. ”

“ With permission, worthiness, I noticed that Thou couldst lead a regiment in spite of thy young face. But I enter the service of no man. I am a free fisherman; my grandfather was, with permission, a shepherd in Lower Egypt, our family comes of the Hyksos people. It is true that dull Egyptian earth-tillers revile us, but I laugh at them. The earth- tillers and the Hyksos, I say, worthiness, are like an ox and a bull. The earth-tiller may go behind the plough or before it, but the Hyksos will not serve any man, unless in the army of his holiness, that is warrior life. ”

“ It may be seen in many a modern fellah, and the truth probably is that the sculptors have in the case of these rulers very faithfully and carefully depicted their portraits, and that their faces happen to have been of a rather hard and forbidding type. But, if we grant the contention of Messrs. Newberry and Garstang for the moment, where is the connection between these XIIth Dynasty kings and the Hyksos? All the Tanite monuments with this peculiar facial type which would be considered Hyksos are certainly of the XIIth Dynasty. ”

“ While the obelisks stand that were set up by the great Hyksos Pharaoh whose descendant was Abi’s mother, while the obelisks stand that are set there for all eternity, we will not acknowledge you. Come down and take your place in our lord’s harem, O Pharaoh’s bastard daughter.”
“Ah!” Tua repeated after him, “while the obelisks stand that the Hyksos thief set up you will not acknowledge me, Pharaoh’s bastard daughter!”
Then she paused and seemed to grow disturbed; she sighed, wrung her hands a little, and said in a choking voice:
“I am but one woman alone among you. ”

“ Hard by Zagazig are the mounds of the ancient Bubastis, and here the excavations carried on by the Egypt Exploration Fund have brought to light remains of the Hyksos Pharaohs, including one of Apopi. Bubastis, therefore, must have been a Hyksos residence, and its temple was adorned by the Hyksos kings. Between Bubastis and Heliopolis stood Pa-Bailos, and of this town Meneptah ii. says at Thebes that “the country around was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers, having been abandoned since the times of old.” ”

“ These Hyksos were to all appearances Canaanites, near relations of the Hittites of Hebron. Hebron was in close community with Zoan, and there is a tradition, probably based upon historical data, that the two cities were built nearly at the same time. As invariably happens when barbarians enter into an ancient and powerful civilisation, the Hyksos soon became Egyptianised. ... The Hyksos of Zoan could not fail to exercise a great influence upon the Hebrews who were encamped around Hebron, the Dead Sea, and in the southern districts of Palestine. ”

“ When, after five generations of warfare, the native princes of Thebes succeeded at last in expelling the Hyksos conquerors from the valley of the Nile and in [191] founding the Eighteenth dynasty, they perceived that their best hope of preventing a second Asiatic conquest lay in possessing themselves of the land which was, as it were, the key to their own. The Hyksos conquest, in fact, had shown that Canaan was at once a link between Asia and Africa, and the open gate which let the invader into the fertile fields of Egypt. ”

“ That their ruling class came from this part of the world seems to me clear from the name of their supreme god Sutekh, who occupied among them the position of the Semitic Baal." A. H. Sayce, The Hyksôs (Academy, September 20,1890) . "Historical research concerning the history of the Hyksos may be summed up as follows: I. A certain number of non-Egyptian kings of foreign origin, belonging to the nation of the Menti, ruled for a long time in the eastern portion of the Delta. II. These chose as their capitals the cities of Zoan and Avaris, and provided them with strong fortifications. ”

“ It is possible that modern writers have exaggerated the credit due to Ahmosis for expelling the Hyksôs. He found the task already half accomplished, and the warfare of his forefathers for at least a century must have prepared the way for his success; if he appears to have played the most important rôle in the history of the deliverance, it is owing to our ignorance of the work of others, and he thus benefits by the oblivion into which their deeds have passed. ”

“ According to the Egyptian legend, Apopi had sent messengers to the prince of Thebes, bidding him worship none other god than Baal-Sutekh, the Hyksos divinity. But Amon-Ra of Thebes avenged the dishonour that had been done him, and stirred up his adorers to successful revolt. For five generations the war went on, and ended with the complete expulsion of the stranger. Southern Egypt first recovered its independence, then Memphis fell, and finally the Hyksos conquerors were driven out of Zoan, their capital, and confined to the fortress of Avaris, on the confines of Asia. ”

“ They treated the men cruelly and they killed the children and they were rude to the ancient gods. They did not like to live in the cities but stayed with their flocks in the open fields and therefore they were called the Hyksos, which means the Shepherd Kings. ”

“ In its divided state Egypt would fall an easy prey to the foreigner. Manetho says that the Hyksos (q.v.) gained Egypt without a blow. Their domination must have lasted a considerable time, the Rhind mathematical papyrus having been copied in the thirty-third year of a king The Hyksos period. Apophis. The monuments and scarabs of the Hyksos kings are found throughout Upper and Lower Egypt; those of Khian somehow spread as far as Crete and Bagdad. ”

“ But ever as they went, others of the turbulent and the rebellious who had been concerned in the slaughter of Pharaoh’s guard, took their place, pouring in from the mob without.
Wild desert-dwellers of the Bedouin tribes, who for thousands of years had been the bitter enemies of Egypt; descendants of the Hyksos, whose forefathers had ruled the land for a dozen generations, and at last been driven out; those Hyksos whose blood ran in Abi’s veins, and who looked to him to lift them up again ”

“ The Hyksos indeed left behind them no architectural memorials, and the Egyptians, when they recovered Lower Egypt, would not be likely to perpetuate their own subjection, nor the priests who instructed Herodotus and Diodorus to confess that the Nile-valley had ever paid tithe or toll to an abominable race of shepherd kings. ”

“ Hyksos Possibly Hittites.—Since the Hittites were able to help overthrow the first dynasty of Babylon, some scholars have recognized the possibility that those invaders of Egypt who established the dynasties called Hyksos may have been Hittites, or may have been led by Hittites. There is much evidence that many [Pg 76] Semites entered Egypt at that time, but as Syria and Palestine were peopled with Semites earlier than this, such an invasion would naturally have had many Semites among its camp followers, if not in its armies, even if the leaders were Hittites. ”

“ In time the Theban nobles increased in power; the Hyksos—or their descendants in the Delta—grew alarmed lest the native princes might become powerful enough to force them from the throne they had usurped. Determined to check any threatening strength on the part of the Egyptians, the foreigners tried to bring about open conflict, sure themselves of victory. At first the Theban princes sought to avert war, but the demands of the Hyksos grew heavier. ”

“ The duration of their control was a number of centuries,—how many can only be conjectured. It is believed by some scholars that either Apepi, or Nub, kings of the Hyksos line, was the sovereign who made Joseph his prime minister, and invited his family to settle in the land of Goshen. The elevation of a foreigner and a Semite to an exalted office is thought to be less improbable in connection with a Semitic dynasty.
The New Empire (from 1600 to 525 B.C.) .—The expulsion of the Hyksos was effected by Aahmes I., first king of the eighteenth dynasty. ”

“ A city may have been of the greatest importance, and we may be certain that beneath our feet are priceless monuments; but if there are twenty or thirty feet of later rubbish over it all, the things might almost as well be in the centre of the earth. Tanis was the Hyksos capital, but it would cost tens{160} of thousands of pounds to lay bare the Hyksos level. The town of the twelfth dynasty at Illahun, on the contrary, yielded a harvest of small objects and papyri, revealing all the products and habits of that remote time, at a cost of two or three hundred pounds ”

“ It rather looks as if the casting out of the Hyksos, the foreign "shepherd kings," made the Egyptians realise that they must combine and unite and not go on fighting among themselves, if they meant to be strong enough to resist the attacks of their neighbours. Whether that was the reason or not, the records seem to show that just at this time there began to be far less fighting between the big landowners ”

“ A warlike race, known to us as the Hyksos, [27] aided no doubt by the wandering tribes beyond the frontier, passed the north-east boundary of Egypt, seized upon the Delta, and set up their kingdom at Avaris, and were doubtless welcomed by the settlers of kindred blood already dwelling in the district. Egypt was weakened by discord ”

“ By the time that Joseph was sold into Egypt there was little outward difference between the court at Zoan and the court of the native princes at Thebes. The very names and titles borne by the Hyksos officials had become Egyptian; and though they still regarded the god Set as the chief object of their worship, they had begun to rebuild the Egyptian temples, and pay honour to the Egyptian deities. ”

“ Whether the Hyksos were Amorites or not, a number of Semitic names were given to places in Lower Egypt at the time of their occupation. Such was the name Magdol, or Migdol. The Egyptian name of Tanis was Zar, which Brugsch claims as Semitic. Thakut, an old name of Pithom, is the same as the Semitic Succoth, “booths.”
In the winter of 1905-1906 Petrie, excavating at Tell el-Ye-hudiyeh, [4] about 20 miles north of Cairo, discovered what he believes to have been one of the original encampments of the Hyksos in Egypt. ”

“ The Hyksos were driven out of the country, and they went back to the desert whence they had come. The experience had been a warning to the Egyptian people. Their five hundred years of foreign slavery had been a terrible experience. Such a thing must never happen again. The frontier of the fatherland must be made so strong that no one dare to attack the holy soil.
A new Theban king, called Tethmosis, invaded Asia and never stopped until he reached the plains of Mesopotamia. He watered his oxen in the river Euphrates, and Babylon and Nineveh trembled at the mention of his name. ”

“ According to Herodotus, the priests of Heliopolis or On were renowned above all others in Egypt for learning.
The Hyksos who held rule in Egypt for so many centuries are regarded as having been wandering hordes of Bedouin Asiatics, called by the Egyptians “the impure,” though they also spoke of them under their name of Amu, regarded as being a word derived from the Semitic 'Am, from the root 'amam, meaning “people.” How early they entered the country is not exactly known, but Petrie's estimate, 2097 b.c., may be taken as the nearest at present possible. ”

“ This theory was abandoned, however, when it was ascertained that the sphinxes of San had been carved, many centuries before the invasion, for Amenemhâît III., a king of the XIIth dynasty. In spite of the facts we possess, the problem therefore still remains unsolved, and the origin of the Hyksôs is as mysterious as ever. We gather, however, that the third millennium before our era was repeatedly disturbed by considerable migratory movements. The expeditions far afield of Elamite and Chaldæan princes could not have taken place without seriously perturbing the regions over which they passed. ”

“ The mystery of the Hyksos has not yet been solved; but it is not impossible that they had relations with Mesopotamia. After they had been driven out of Egypt (q.v.) , when Aḥmōse, the officer of Tethmosis (Thutmose) I., mentions Naharin (late 16th century) , he does not say anything about the inhabitants. He seems to imply, however, that there was more than one state. The first mention of Mitanni, as we saw, is under Tethmosis III., who clearly crossed the Euphrates. It is at least possible that common enmity to Mitanni led to a treaty with Assyria (under Ashur-nadin-akhe) . ”

“ Further, it would seem to have been possible for them to engage in wars on their own account with the races living further up the Nile, or with the wild tribes of the desert, and thus to maintain warlike habits among themselves, while the Hyksôs were becoming unaccustomed to them. ”