Home › Egypt Before the Time Of › Egypt Before the Time Of: Hycsos
Egypt Before the Time Of: Hycsos
During this whole space of time, they never ceased to wage a war of extermination on the Egyptian race, and they were called the Hycsos or Shepherd Kings, for hac in the sacred tongue means king, and sos in the vulgar idiom a shepherd. * A curious document which has come down to us from those remote times yields the support of irrefutable testimony to Manetho's recital. There may be read on a hieratic papyrus in the British Museum the following inscription : "It happened that the land of Egypt fell into the * Extract of Manetho in Flavius Josephus, contra Appionem. 073 View of Phile. The Smaller Temple. 1 HUYOT hands of strangers (Aad-tus) and then there were no native Pharaohs left in the whole country. At that time their descendant, Ra-Sekenen, was nothing but a hac, or chief, of Upper Egypt. The Aad-tus held the strong city of the sun * and their king, his majesty Apapias, resided at Ha-War. The whole country was tributary to him, and brought him all its good productions after the example of the lower country (Lower Egypt). "And his majesty Ra-Apapias chose the god Sutech as his Lord, and would not be the worshipper of any other god in the entire region, and he built a temple to him in good imperishable stone:"‡ In the presence of text so specific and formal as this, what becomes of the forty preceding centuries of administrative and territorial unity? What remains of all that systematic scaffolding?-unless it be the undeniable proof that the Egypt of those days succumbed so easily, only through the absence of unitary institutions and traditions, the manity of her past existence as a nation. * This designation may be applied to Thebes, as well as to Heliopolis. † This word, which is entirely Aryan in origin, would suffice to indicate the primitive country of the Hycsos. War, in the Zend language, means the original enclosure built by Jemshia.- Wara or War, in Pelhvi, or old Persian, meaning borough, fortified enclosure. See Appendix IV. 1 Surprised amid the pre-occupations inherent to the long infancy in which her servile education kept her under the yoke of religious and royal formalism; parcelled out by the rival pretensions of her various tribes, her cities and her two controlling castes; more accustomed to luxurious pageants, to religious chantings and processions sweeping past from temple to temple along her sacred river, than inured to warlike exercises and the din of battle; better skilled in handling the hoe that fertilizes the soil and the chisel that carves decorations in granite for the hours of peace, than in brandishing the bow and shield which would have saved her in the hour of peril, Egypt fell completely prone before the Hycsos and disappeared for a time beneath the billows of invasion.
The latter, sweeping all before it with barbarian fury, frenzied as it was by the fanaticism of an image-breaking creed, halted only at the limits which nature herself had set to its easy conquest.
Those limits were the rocky mountain ranges that a little below the Tropic, and parallel to it, extended from the Libyan desert to the shores of the Red Sea.
