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After twenty centuries of independent life, a savage Arab tribe of shepherds, called the Hyksos, attacked Egypt and for five hundred years they were the masters of the valley of the Nile.
It lay apart from the cultivated lands of the Egyptian peasantry, it adjoined the desert which led to Asia, and it was near the Hyksos capital of Zoan.
Wild desert-dwellers of the Bedouin tribes, who for thousands of years had been the bitter enemies of Egypt; descendants of the Hyksos, whose forefathers had ruled the land for a dozen generations, and at last been driven out; those Hyksos whose blood ran in Abi's veins, and who looked to him to lift them up again; evil-doers who had sought shelter in his regiments; hook-nosed Semites from the Lebanon; black, barbarian savages from the shores of Punt with such as these was that hall filled.
The short reigns of the kings of the dynasty that followed show that the line of the Pharaohs was again becoming feeble. It closed in disaster and overthrow. Hordes of invaders poured into Egypt from Asia and overran the whole country. They are known as the Hyksos or Shepherds, and the greater part of them were of Semitic descent.
His chariot was to be seen everywhere: now he was with the workmen, who were to decorate triumphal arches with fresh flowers; now with the slaves, who were hanging garlands on the wooden lions erected on the road for this great occasion; now and this detained him longest he watched the progress of the immense palace which was being rapidly constructed of wood on the site where formerly the camp of the Hyksos had stood, in which the actual ceremony of receiving the king was to take place, and where the Pharaoh and his immediate followers were to reside.
There were single jewels which equaled a town in value. "This is our property in case of misfortune," said the overseer. "For what misfortune are ye waiting?" inquired the pharaoh. "The people are poor, the nobility and the court are in debt, the army decreased one half, the pharaoh without money. Has Egypt ever been in a worse position?" "It was in a worse position when the Hyksos conquered it."
War and commerce were their two trades. The Kassite conquerors of Babylonia soon submitted to the influences of Babylonian civilisation. Like the Hyksos in Egypt, they adopted the manners and customs, the writing and language, of the conquered people, sometimes even their names.
The people who fought against Cambyses were not the race who marched into Egypt five thousand years before the dynastic people whose portraits we see on the early monuments. In those fifty centuries the blood of Hyksos and Syrians and Ethiopians and Hittites, and who can say how many more races, must have mingled with that of the old Egyptians.
Widespread trade in gold, ivory, precious stones, skins, wood, and works of handicraft arose. The Negro began to figure as the great trader of Egypt. This new wealth of Ethiopia excited the cupidity of the Pharaohs and led to aggression and larger intercourse, until at last, when the dread Hyksos appeared, Ethiopia became both a physical and cultural refuge for conquered Egypt.
They therefore revive the theory of de Cara, which connects the Hyksos with the Hittites and these with the Pelasgi and Tyrseni. This is a very interesting theory, which, when carried out to its logical conclusion, would connect the Hyksos and Hittites racially with the pre-Hellenic "Minoan" Mycenseans of Greece, as well as with the Etruscans of Italy. But there is little of certainty in it.
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