The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 01 : $b Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia
History
The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 01 : $b Prolegomena; Egypt, Mesopotamia
World history
It follows that only a very few of these kings are known to us through
the monuments, and the majority only by insignificant memorials. Their
names appear only occasionally in the stone quarries at Hammamat, or
in Karnak and Abydos, or they have statues, which are far inferior to
those of the preceding epoch.
And yet we have from this, as well as from the preceding epoch, a line
of graves and tomb steles in Abydos, as well as numerous rock tombs in
El-Kab (Eleithyia), and probably also the great rock graves of Assiut
(Lycopolis), which attest the position and power of the high priests
of Anubis and the governors of the nome. They are as important for
this period as the graves of Beni-Hasan are for the XIIth Dynasty, but
unfortunately they are in a much worse condition, and much poorer in
historical information.
THE FOREIGN RULE
The facts above mentioned clearly show that the Egypt of this period
was governed under conditions similar to those existing in the Roman
Empire in the third century after Christ.
In fact, as a fuller light is thrown upon Egyptian history, there seems
to have been a whole line of dynasties, evidently local, coexistent
with the chief king at Thebes. If Neferhotep and Sebekhotep V still
reigned over Egypt from Nubia to Tanis, the Delta was lost under their
successors. It is not an improbable theory of Stern’s that Manetho’s
XIVth Dynasty of seventy-six kings from Xoïs (Sakha), in the western
Delta, included Libyan foreign rulers who occupied the Delta.
But the chief invaders of this time were an Asiatic race who made a
violent attack on the power of the Pharaohs at Thebes. They were the
Mentu, or, as they are now called, the Mentu of Satet, that is “the
barbarous Asiatic country.” They were called the Shepherds or Hyksos by
their contemporaries and by Manetho.
Of what race the Hyksos were, is not known. Some points in the account
show that we have here to do with an invasion of Bedouin races, one of
those frequent raids upon cultivated land by nomads of the desert.
Among the latest opinions on the subject is one that ascribes to the
Hyksos a partly Semitic and partly Turanian origin, and accounts for
their settling in Egypt by their being crowded out of western Asia in
the numerous race conflicts of which that part of the world was the
arena. The expelled people could find no resting-place among the wild
hordes of Syria, and moved on to the peaceful and fertile valley of the
Nile.
It is certain that Semitic and Canaanitish, not Arabic, elements
penetrated to Egypt under the Hyksos. The Egyptian language was
subsequently sprinkled with Canaanitish words; the specifically
Canaanitish divinities Baal Astarte (in the feminine form), Anit,
Reshpu, etc., were afterwards extensively worshipped in the eastern
Delta, and in the whole of Egypt. In the next centuries we find
Canaanitish proper names everywhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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