His predecessors had in reality been merely Pharaohs on sufferance, ruling in the south within the confines of their Theban principality, gaining in power, it is true, with every generation, but never able to attain to the suzerainty of the whole country. They were reckoned in the XVIIth dynasty together with the Hyksôs sovereigns of uncontested legitimacy, while their successors were chosen to constitute the XVIIIth, comprising Pharaohs with full powers, tolerating no competitors, and uniting under their firm rule the two regions of which Egypt was composed—the possessions of Sit and the possessions of Horus.*
* Manetho, or his abridgers, call the king who drove out the
Shepherds Amôsis or Tethmôsis. Lepsius thought he saw
grounds for preferring the second reading, and identified
this Tethmôsis with Thûtmosi Manakhpirri, the ïhûtmosis III.
of our lists; Ahmosis could only have driven out the greater
part of the nation. This theory, to which Naville still
adheres, as also does Stindorff, was disputed nearly fifty
years ago by E. de Rougé; nowadays we are obliged to admit
that, subsequent to the Vth year of Ahmosis, there were no
longer Shepherd-kings in Egypt, even though a part of the
conquering race may have remained in the country in a state
of slavery, as we shall soon have occasion to observe.
The war of deliverance broke out on the accession of Ahmosis, and continued during the first five years of his reign.* One of his lieutenants, the king’s namesake—Âhmosi-si-Abîna—who belonged to the family of the lords of Nekhabît, has left us an account, in one of the inscriptions in his tomb, of the numerous exploits in which he took part side by side with his royal master, and thus, thanks to this fortunate record of his vanity, we are not left in complete ignorance of the events which took place during this crucial struggle between the Asiatic settlers and their former subjects. Nekhabît had enjoyed considerable prosperity in the earlier ages of Egyptian history, marking as it did the extreme southern limit of the kingdom, and forming an outpost against the barbarous tribes of Nubia. As soon as the progress of conquest had pushed the frontier as far south as the first cataract, it declined in importance, and the remembrance of its former greatness found an echo only in proverbial expressions or in titles used at the Pharaonic court.* The nomes situated to the south of Thebes, unlike those of Middle Egypt, did not comprise any extensive fertile or well-watered territory calculated to enrich its possessors or to afford sufficient support for a large population: they consisted of long strips of alluvial soil, shut in between the river and the mountain range, but above the level of the inundation, and consequently difficult to irrigate.
* This is evident from passage in the biography of Ahmosi-
si-Abîna, where it is stated that, after the taking of
Avaris, the king passed into Asia in the year VI. The first
few lines of the Great Inscription of El-Kab seem to refer
to four successive campaigns, i.e. four years of warfare up
to the taking of Avaris, and to a fifth year spent in
pursuing the Shepherds into Syria.
** The vulture of Nekhabît is used to indicate the south,
while the urseus of Buto denotes the extreme north; the
title Râ-Nekhnît, “Chief of Nekhnît,” which is,
hypothetically, supposed to refer to a judicial function, is
none the less associated with the expression, “Nekhabît-
Tekhnît,” as an indication of the south, and, therefore,
can be traced to the prehistoric epoch when Nekhabît was the
primary designation of the south.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
