After the conquest, the chiefs of the shepherds ruled over Egypt. The inscriptions on the monuments repeatedly denote certain tribes in the east of Egypt by the name Schasu, which in the later language is contracted into Sôs. _Schasu_ means shepherds. Moreover, in old Egyptian, the head of a family, a tribe, and a province is called _hak_, and Hyksos thus can be explained by _Haku-schasu_, chiefs of the shepherds, shepherd kings, as Josephus, Eusebius, and Africanus render it.[181] What Manetho tells us of the destruction of the cities and shrines, the slaughter and enslaving of the Egyptians may be correct for the time of the war and conquest. But this hostility and destruction cannot, as he intimates, have gone on for centuries, for, on the restoration of the Pharaohs, we find ancient Egypt unimpaired in population, unchanged in language, customs, and manners, in civilisation and art. If the national development was interrupted and repressed by the Hyksos, it still remained uninjured at the core, so far as we have the means of judging. When at a subsequent period the kings of Ethiopia subjugated Egypt, the warrior caste, the soldiers settled in the country by the Pharaohs, were deprived of their lands. The same thing may have taken place on the irruption of the shepherds. The warriors of the Pharaohs fell in battle, were carried away as prisoners, or deprived of their weapons; and in their place came the victorious army of the shepherds. Of these many would soon return home laden with the booty of Egypt, others pitched their tents in the conquered land, and settled in the greenest meadows, more especially in the eastern provinces of the Delta, nearest their own home, on the Tanitic and Pelusiac arms of the Nile, and Lake Menzaleh. The chief of the immigrants became the head of the conquerors and the conquered. The latter would render the same abject homage to their new masters as they rendered before and after to their native kings; and the power which the conquered willingly acknowledged in the chief would exalt his position even among the conquerors. As time went on, the culture and civilisation of Egypt had their natural effect on the barbarous invaders, and when the storm of conquest was over, we may assume that Egypt was no worse off under the rule of the shepherd kings than at later periods under the rule of the Persians, the Ptolemies, and the Romans.