Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [66]
One little mystery about the Hyksos has been cleared up in recent years. We knew the name of their capital, Avaris, from Egyptian records. But where was Avaris? The favored contender was Tanis, the site that became the capital under the late dynasties. However, an Austrian expedition under Manfred Bietak has established, beyond doubt, that the modern Tell el Dab’a is the right place. Working under the difficult conditions that prevail in the Delta area, Beitak found several layers of occupation, with characteristic non-Egyptian pottery.
The major contributions of the Hyksos to Egyptian life were in the realm of warfare. They probably introduced the horse and chariot and the compound bow. As yet we cannot add much more to our picture of the mysterious people called the Hyksos, except for one small fact. Some of these people had Semitic names.
Asiatics—men of Semitic speech—in ancient Egypt; here biblical scholars pricked up their ears. The connection of the Hebrews with Egypt has been the subject of long and wearisome discussion among historians. There is no Egyptian reference to Moses, nor to Joseph; no text contains even a faint echo of the long captivity or the Exodus. Israel is mentioned only once, in a list of conquered territories. It is no wonder that the theories about the Hebrews in Egypt vary considerably. One school of thought would place the Exodus in the fifteenth century B.C., another in the thirteenth; a third version contends that there was no single, large exodus of enslaved peoples, but a series of small exodi, so to speak, which were coalesced by Jewish tradition and historians into a single event. More on this later; what we are concerned with now is how the Hyksos can be fitted into the story.
If we suppose that it was during this period that Joseph was brought down into Egypt by the slavers to whom his wicked brothers had sold him, we find it easier to understand the speed with which he, a slave, rose to power. He was a man of Semitic speech and customs serving a king from the same sort of ethnic background. If this sounds plausible, let us not forget that the ancients were not so conscious as we about the ties of “blood and birth”; social distinctions were very important, and a slave was a slave wherever he came from. We can hardly envision the Egyptianized Hyksos king taking a slave to his bosom just because the fellow came from his hometown. Still and all, it may be more likely that Joseph could have overcome the handicap of his servitude under a non-Egyptian ruling class. The position he came to hold was equivalent to that of vizier, the highest nonhereditary post in the land and the most powerful under the king. The people who made up the Hyksos consisted of many different tribes and ethnic groups. One of these groups, say some biblical scholars, could have been the Hebrews. Later, when an Egyptian royal family expelled the Hyksos, the men and groups which had been favored by the invaders would have been in disrepute, and so new kings might indeed be called “kings who knew not Joseph.” So, the advocates of this theory claim, the servitude of the Hebrews began.
It all makes perfect sense, but so do the plots of good historical novels.
At first the Hyksos occupation was limited to the Delta region, at whose eastern end the Asiatics had entered Egypt. The Thirteenth Dynasty continued to rule most of Egypt, except for an area near Xois, whose princes belong to Manetho’s Fourteenth Dynasty. Then, about 1675 B.C., a new impetus, perhaps in the form of a more energetic Asiatic prince, prompted further Hyksos expansion, which ended in the conquest of a larger part of Egypt. Manetho called the second period the Fifteenth Dynasty, and its rulers he termed the “Great Hyksos.” He lists