Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [65]
Four
THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
Cartouche of Ahmose
INVASION
There was a king of ours whose name was Tutimaois, in whose reign it came to pass, I know not why, that God was displeased with us, and there came unexpectedly men of obscure birth out of the eastern parts, who had boldness enough to make an expedition into our country, and easily subdued it by force without a battle. And when they had overpowered our rulers, they afterward savagely burnt down our cities and razed the temples of the gods, and used all the inhabitants in a cruelly hostile manner, for they slew some and led the children and wives of others into slavery…. All this nation was styled Hyksos, that is, Shepherd Kings; for “hyk” in the sacred language denotes a king, and “sos” in the vulgar tongue signifies a shepherd.
This is one of the few surviving quotations from Manetho; it was copied by Josephus, for reasons of his own. I may have given the impression that Manetho is not to be trusted, and, in fact, I don’t think he is. (Neither is Josephus.) Three statements in the account given above are partially correct. Egypt was invaded by people who took over part of the country, the invaders came from “eastern parts,” and some of them—not all—were styled Hyksos.
Obviously, the fact that we are able to sneer at Manetho means that we have other sources of information. Contemporary inscriptional evidence, mostly isolated monuments and scarabs, is spotty. The Turin Papyrus or King List, one of the basic chronological sources, is also spotty. In fact, it’s in pieces. People have been trying to put it back together for years. Certain Egyptian texts mention the great humiliation inflicted by the Hyksos—whom they call “Aamu,” or “Asiatics”—but all of them were written long after the event. The Egyptians suffered from a sort of official amnesia with regard to unpleasant facts; one has the feeling that the conquest would never have been mentioned at all if there had been a reasonable way of glorifying a king for liberating his country without referring to what he was liberating it from.
Manetho’s etymology, among other matters, is inaccurate. The word Hyksos does not mean “Shepherd Kings”; it is derived from two Egyptian words that mean “Rulers of Foreign Countries.” It seems to have been a title and was applied not to the invaders as a group, but to their rulers; however, for the sake of convenience, we will refer to the whole lot by that name. The foreign countries were probably the lands of southwest Asia. Asiatics were always seeping down into Egypt; they came as immigrants, traders, and, in later periods, slaves, and some seem to have settled down quite peacefully in various parts of the Delta. During the period of internal weakness after the Old Kingdom, greater numbers of immigrants entered the country, just as the Hyksos seem to have done after the fall of the Middle Kingdom. There was considerable restlessness in Asia during this period, and great movements of tribes and ethnic groups. New faces and names appear in other areas of the Near East, and it may be that the Hyksos were part of the wide Völkerwanderung, which originated, perhaps, in the steppes of the Caucasus and picked up additional components as it wandered.
The conquest was not so bloody nor so destructive as the melodramatic Egyptian writers claimed. The Hyksos rulers became Egyptianized, using the hieroglyphic writing, assuming the Egyptian royal titulary, and worshiping the old gods. They particularly honored