The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

The invaders were called by Manetho, the Egyptian historian, the Hyksos or Shepherd Princes: on the monuments they are known as the Aamu or “Asiatics.” At first, we are told, their progress was marked by massacre and destruction. The temples were profaned and overthrown, the cities burned with fire. But after a while the higher culture of the conquered people overcame the conquerors. A king arose among the invaders who soon adopted the prerogatives and state of the Pharaohs. The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth dynasties were Hyksos.

Recent discoveries have proved that at one time the dominion of the Hyksos extended, if not to the first cataract, at all events far to the south of Thebes. Their monuments have been found at Gebelên and El-Kab. Gradually, however, the native princes recovered their power in Upper Egypt. While the seventeenth Hyksos dynasty was reigning at Zoan, or Tanis, in the north, a seventeenth Egyptian dynasty was ruling at Thebes. But the princes of Thebes did not as yet venture to claim the imperial [pg 015] title. They still acknowledged the supremacy of the foreign Pharaoh.

The war of independence broke out in the reign of the Hyksos king Apopi. 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. But even here they were not safe from the avenging hand of the Egyptian. Ahmes I., the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, drove them from their last refuge and pursued them into Palestine.

The land which had sent forth its hordes to conquer Egypt was now in turn to be conquered by the Egyptians. The war was carried into Asia, and the struggle for independence became a struggle for empire. Under the Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, Egypt, for the first time in its history, became a great military state. Army after army [pg 016] poured out of the gates of Thebes, and brought back to it the spoils of the known world. Ethiopia and Syria alike felt the tread of the Egyptian armies, and had alike to bow the neck to Egyptian rule. Canaan became an Egyptian province, Egyptian garrisons were established in the far north on the frontiers of the Hittite tribes, and the boundaries of the Pharaoh's empire were pushed to the banks of the Euphrates.

It is probable that Abraham did not enter Egypt until after the Hyksos conquest. But before the rise of the eighteenth dynasty Egyptian chronology is uncertain. We have to reckon it by dynasties rather than by years. According to Manetho, the Old Empire lasted 1478 years, and a considerable interval must be allowed for the troublous times which intervened between its fall and the beginning of the Middle Empire. We learn from the Turin papyrus—a list of the Egyptian kings and dynasties compiled in the time of Ramses ii., but now, alas! in tattered fragments—that the tenth dynasty lasted 355 years and 10 days, the eleventh dynasty 243 years. The duration of the twelfth dynasty is known from the monuments (165 years 2 months), that of the thirteenth, with its more than one hundred and fifty kings, cannot have been short. How long the Hyksos rule endured it is difficult to say. Africanus, [pg 017] quoting from Manetho, as Professor Erman has shown, makes it 953 years, with which the fragment quoted by Josephus from the Egyptian historian also agrees. In this case the Hyksos conquest of Egypt would have taken place about 2550 b.c.

Unfortunately the original work of Manetho is lost, and we are dependent for our knowledge of it on later writers, most of whom sought to harmonise its chronology with that of the Septuagint. When we further remember the corruptions undergone by numerical figures in passing through the hands of the copyists, it is clear that we cannot place implicit confidence in the Manethonian numbers as they have come down to us. Indeed, the writers who have recorded them do not always agree together, and we find the names of kings arbitrarily omitted or the length of their reigns shortened in order to force the chronology into agreement with that of the author. The twelfth dynasty reigned 134 years according to Eusebius, 160 years according to Africanus; its real duration was 165 years, 2 months, and 12 days.

With the help of certain astronomical data furnished by the monuments, Dr. Mahler, the Viennese astronomer, has succeeded in determining the exact date of the reigns of the two most famous monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, [pg 018] Thothmes iii. and Ramses ii. Thothmes iii. reigned from the 20th of March b.c. 1503 to the 14th of February b.c. 1449, while the reign of Ramses ii. lasted from b.c. 1348 to b.c. 1281. The date of Thothmes iii. enables us to fix the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty about b.c. 1570.

The dynasties of Manetho were successive and not contemporaneous. This fact was one of the main results of the excavations and discoveries of Mariette Pasha. The old attempts to form artificial schemes of chronology—which, however, satisfied no one but their authors—upon the supposition that some of the dynasties reigned together are now discredited for ever. Every fresh discovery made in Egypt, which adds to our knowledge of ancient Egyptian history, makes the fact still more certain. There were epochs, indeed, when more than one line of kings claimed sway in the valley of the Nile, but when such was the case, Manetho selected what he or his authorities considered the sole legitimate dynasty, and disregarded every other. Of the two rival twenty-first dynasties which the monuments have brought to light, the lists of Manetho recognise but one, and the Assyrian rule in Egypt at a subsequent date is ignored in favour of the princes of Sais who were reigning at the same time.

If, then, any reliance is to be placed on the length [pg 019] of time ascribed to the Hyksos dominion in the valley of the Nile, and if we are still to hold to the old belief of Christendom and see in the Hebrew wanderer into Egypt the Abram who contended against Chedor-laomer and the subject kings of Babylonia, it would have been about two centuries after the settlement of the Asiatic conquerors in the Delta that Abraham and Sarah arrived at their court. The court was doubtless held at Zoan, the modern Sân. Here was the Hyksos capital, and its proximity to the Asiatic frontier of Egypt made it easy of access to a traveller from Palestine. We are told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt; and it may be that the building here referred to was that which caused Zoan to become the seat of the Hyksos power.

Asiatic migration into Egypt was no new thing. On the walls of one of the tombs of Beni-Hassan there is pictured the arrival of thirty-seven Aamu or Asiatics “of Shu,” in the sixth year of Usertesen ii. of the twelfth dynasty. Under the conduct of their chief, Ab-sha, they came from the mountains of the desert, bringing with them gazelles as well as kohl for the ladies of the court. Four women in long bright-coloured robes walk between groups of bearded men, and two children are carried in a pannier on a donkey's back. The men are armed with bows, [pg 020] their feet are shod with sandals, and they wear the vari-coloured garments for which the people of Phœnicia were afterwards famed.