It is possible that they owed this rapid victory to the presence in their armies of a factor hitherto unknown to the African—the war-chariot—and before the horse and his driver the Egyptians gave way in a body.* The invaders appeared as a cloud of locusts on the banks of the Nile. Towns and temples were alike pillaged, burnt, and ruined; they massacred all they could of the male population, reduced to slavery those of the women and children whose lives they spared, and then proclaimed as king Salatis, one of their chiefs.** He established a semblance of regular government, chose Memphis as his capital, and imposed a tax upon the vanquished. Two perils, however, immediately threatened the security of his triumph: in the south the Theban lords, taking matters into their own hands after the downfall of the Xoites, refused the oath of allegiance to Salatis, and organized an obstinate resistance;*** in the north he had to take measures to protect himself against an attack of the Chaldæans or of the Élamites who were oppressing Chaldæa.****
* The horse was unknown, or at any rate had not been
employed in. Egypt prior to the invasion; we find it,
however, in general use immediately after the expulsion of
the Shepherds, see the tomb of Pihiri. Moreover, all
historians agree in admitting that it was introduced into
the country under the rule of the Shepherds. The use of the
war-chariot in Chaldæa at an epoch prior to the Hyksôs
invasion, is proved by a fragment of the Vulture Stele; it
is therefore, natural to suppose that the Hyksôs used the
chariot in war, and that the rapidity of their conquest was
due to it.
** The name Salatis (var. Saitôs) seems to be derived from a
Semitic word, Siialît = “the chief,” “the governor;” this
was the title which Joseph received when Pharaoh gave him
authority over the whole of Egypt (Gen. xli. 43). Salatis
may not, therefore, have been the real name of the first
Hyksôs king, but his title, which the Egyptians
misunderstood, and from which they evolved a proper name:
Uhlemann has, indeed, deduced from this that Manetho, being
familiar with the passage referring to Joseph, had forged
the name of Salatis. Ebers imagined that he could decipher
the Egyptian form of this prince’s name on the Colossus of
Tell-Mokdam, where Naville has since read with certainty the
name of a Pharaoh of the XIIIth and XIVth dynasties,
Nahsiri.
*** The text of Manetho speaks of taxes which he imposed on
the high and low lands, which would seem to include the
Thebaid in the kingdom; it is, however, stated in the next
few pages that the successors of Salatis waged an incessant
war against the Egyptians, which can only refer to
hostilities against the Thebans. We are forced, therefore,
to admit, either that Manetho took the title of lord of the
high and low lands which belonged to Salatis, literally, or
that the Thebans, after submitting at first, subsequently
refused to pay tribute, thus provoking a war.
**** Manetho here speaks of Assyrians; this is an error
which is to be explained by the imperfect state of
historical knowledge in Greece at the time of the Macedonian
supremacy. We need not for this reason be led to cast doubt
upon the historic value of the narrative: we must remember
the suzerainty which the kings of Babylon exercised over
Syria, and read Chaldæans where Manetho has written
Assyrians. In Herodotus “Assyria” is the regular term for
“Babylonia,” and Babylonia is called “the land of the
Assyrians.”
From the natives of the Delta, who were temporarily paralysed by their reverses, he had, for the moment, little to fear: restricting himself, therefore, to establishing forts at the strategic points in the Nile valley in order to keep the Thebans in check, he led the main body of his troops to the frontier on the isthmus. Pacific immigrations had already introduced Asiatic settlers into the Delta, and thus prepared the way for securing the supremacy of the new rulers; in the midst of these strangers, and on the ruins of the ancient town of Hâwârît-Avaris, in the Sethro’ifce nome—a place connected by tradition with the myth of Osiris and Typhon—Salatis constructed an immense entrenched camp, capable of sheltering two hundred and forty thousand men. He visited it yearly to witness the military manoeuvres, to pay his soldiers, and to preside over the distribution of rations. This permanent garrison protected him from a Chaldæan invasion, a not unlikely event as long as Syria remained under the supremacy of the Babylonian kings; it furnished his successors also with an inexhaustible supply of trained soldiers, thus enabling them to complete the conquest of Lower Egypt. Years elapsed before the princes of the south would declare themselves vanquished, and five kings—Anôn, Apachnas, Apôphis I., Iannas, and Asses—passed their lifetime “in a perpetual warfare, desirous of tearing up Egypt to the very root.” These Theban kings, who were continually under arms against the barbarians, were subsequently classed in a dynasty by themselves, the XVth of Manetho, but they at last succumbed to the invader, and Asses became master of the entire country. His successors in their turn formed a dynasty, the XVIth, the few remaining monuments of which are found scattered over the length and breadth of the valley from the shores of the Mediterranean to the rocks of the first cataract.
The Egyptians who witnessed the advent of this Asiatic people called them by the general term Amûû, Asiatics, or Monâtiû, the men of the desert.* They had already given the Bedouin the opprobrious epithet of Shaûsû—pillagers or robbers—which aptly described them;** and they subsequently applied the same name to the intruders—Hiq Shaûsû—from which the Greeks derived their word Hyksôs, or Hykoussôs, for this people.***
* The meaning of the term Monîti was discovered by E. de
Rougé, who translated it Shepherd, and applied it to the
Hyksôs; from thence it passed into the works of all the
Egyptologists who concerned themselves with this question,
but Shepherd has not been universally accepted as the
meaning of the word. It is generally agreed that it was a
generic term, indicating the races with which their
conquerors were supposed to be connected, and not the
particular term of which Manetho’s word Hoiveves would be
the literal translation.
** The name seems, in fact, to be derived from a word which
meant “to rob,” “to pillage.” The name Shausu, Shosu, was
not used by the Egyptians to indicate a particular race. It
was used of all Bedouins, and in general of all the
marauding tribes who infested the desert or the mountains.
The Shausu most frequently referred to on the monuments are
those from the desert between Egypt and Syria, but there is
a reference, in the time of Ramses II., to those from the
Lebanon and the valley of Orontes. Krall finds an allusion
to them in a word (Shosim) in Judges ii. 14, which is
generally translated by a generic expression, “the
spoilers.”
*** Manetho declares that the people were called Hyksôs,
from Syk, which means “king” in the sacred language, and
sôs, which means “shepherd” in the popular language. As a
matter of fact, the word Hyku means “prince “in the
classical language of Egypt, or, as Manetho styles it, the
sacred language, i.e. in the idiom of the old religious,
historical, and literary texts, which in later ages the
populace no longer understood. Shôs, on the contrary,
belongs to the spoken language of the later time, and does
not occur in the ancient inscriptions, so that Manetho’s
explanation is valueless; there is but one material fact to
be retained from his evidence, and that is the name Hyk-
Shôs or Hyku-Shôs given by its inventors to the alien
kings. Cham-pollion and Rosellini were the first to identify
these Shôs with the Shaûsû whom they found represented on
the monuments, and their opinion, adopted by some, seems to
me an extremely plausible one: the Egyptians, at a given
moment, bestowed the generic name of Shaûsû on these
strangers, just as they had given those of Amûû and Manâtiû.
The texts or writers from whom Manetho drew his information
evidently mentioned certain kings hyku-Shaûsû; other
passages, or, the same passages wrongly interpreted, were
applied to the race, and were rendered hyku-Shaûsû = “the
prisoners taken from the Shaûsû,” a substantive derived
from the root haka = “to take” being substituted for the
noun hyqu = “prince.” Josephus declares, on the authority
of Manetho, that some manuscripts actually suggested this
derivation—a fact which is easily explained by the custom
of the Egyptian record offices. I may mention, in passing,
that Mariette recognised in the element “Sôs” an Egyptian
word shôs = “soldiers,” and in the name of King Mîrmâshâû,
which he read Mîrshôsû, an equivalent of the title Hyq-
Shôsû.
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. As a matter of fact, these monuments present all the characteristics of the Mongoloid type of countenance—the small and slightly oblique eyes, the arched but somewhat flattened nose, the pronounced cheekbones and well-covered jaw, the salient chin and full lips slightly depressed at the corners.** These peculiarities are also observed in the three heads found at Damanhur, in the colossal torso dug up at Mit-Farês in the Fayum, in the twin figures of the Nile removed to the Bulaq Museum from Tanis, and upon the remains of a statue in the collection at the Villa Ludovisi in Rome. The same foreign type of face is also found to exist among the present inhabitants of the villages scattered over the eastern part of the Delta, particularly on the shores of Lake Menzaleh, and the conclusion was drawn that these people were the direct descendants of the Hyksôs.
* Manetho takes them to be Phoenicians, but he adds that
certain writers thought them to be Arabs: Brugsch favours
this latter view, but the Arab legend of a conquest of Egypt
by Sheddâd and the Adites is of recent origin, and was
inspired by traditions in regard to the Hyksôs current
during the Byzantine epoch; we cannot, therefore, allow it
to influence us. We must wait before expressing a definite
opinion in regard to the facts which Glaser believes he has
obtained from the Minoan inscriptions which date from the
time of the Hyksôs.
** Mariette, who was the first to describe these curious
monuments, recognised in them all the incontestable
characteristics of a Semitic type, and the correctness of
his view was, at first, universally admitted. Later on Hamy
imagined that he could distinguish traces of Mongolian
influences, and Er. Lenormant, and then Mariette himself
came round to this view; it has recently been supported in
England by Flower, and in Germany by Virchow.
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. They must have encountered by the way many nomadic or unsettled tribes whom a slight shock would easily displace. An impulse once given, it needed but little to accelerate or increase the movement: a collision with one horde reacted on its neighbours, who either displaced or carried others with them, and the whole multitude, gathering momentum as they went, were precipitated in the direction first given.*
* The Hyksôs invasion has been regarded as a natural result
of the Elamite conquest.
A tradition, picked up by Herodotus on his travels, relates that the Phoenicians had originally peopled the eastern and southern shores of the Persian Gulf;* it was also said that Indathyrses, a Scythian king, had victoriously scoured the whole of Asia, and had penetrated as far as Egypt.** Either of these invasions may have been the cause of the Syrian migration. In. comparison with the meagre information which has come down to us under the form of legends, it is provoking to think how much actual fact has been lost, a tithe of which would explain the cause of the movement and the mode of its execution. The least improbable hypothesis is that which attributes the appearance of the Shepherds about the XXIIIrd century B.C., to the arrival in Naharaim of those Khati who subsequently fought so obstinately against the armies both of the Pharaohs and the Ninevite kings. They descended from the mountain region in which the Halys and the Euphrates take their rise, and if the bulk of them proceeded no further than the valleys of the Taurus and the Amanos, some at least must have pushed forward as far as the provinces on the western shores of the Dead Sea. The most adventurous among them, reinforced by the Canaanites and other tribes who had joined them on their southward course, crossed the isthmus of Suez, and finding a people weakened by discord, experienced no difficulty in replacing the native dynasties by their own barbarian chiefs.***