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Moreover they told their story from the very beginning, when they had entered Egypt hundreds of years before and were succoured by the vizier of the Pharaoh of that day, one Yusuf, a powerful and clever man of their race who stored corn in a time of famine and low Niles. This Pharaoh was of the Hyksos people, one of the Shepherd kings whom we Egyptians hated and after many wars drove out of Khem.
We therefore resume our narrative at a point before the great increase of Theban power at the time of the expulsion of the Hyksos, and will trace this power from its rise, which followed the defeat of Herakleopolis and Memphis. It is upon this epoch the beginning of Theban power that the latest discoveries at Thebes have thrown some new light.
Poetry heroic, lyrical, and religious flourished, and a sort of Egyptian Iliad was constructed by the poet Pentaur out of a deed of personal prowess on the part of Ramses II. during the war with the Hittites. Reference has already been made to the work on mathematics that was composed when the Hyksos were ruling Egypt.
The intercourse between Crete and Egypt, however, goes much farther back than either the domination of the Hyksos or the Middle Kingdom.
It would seem that the Israelites entered Egypt when the country was governed by the last of those foreign dynasties from Asia which had conquered the kingdom of the Pharaoh, and are known by the name of the Hyksos or Shepherd kings. The Egyptian monuments have shown us that during their dominion its internal constitution underwent precisely the change which is described in the history of Joseph.
The history of Joseph accounts for this, and it is the only explanation of the fact which is at present forthcoming. Famine compelled the people to sell their lands to the king and his minister, and a Hyksos Pharaoh and his Hebrew vizier thus succeeded in destroying the older aristocracy and despoiling the natives of their estates.
The Theban princes who drove them out became kings of Egypt, and followed them into Asia. With an army trained in war by the long struggle with the Hyksos, the Egyptian kings, having tasted the sweetness of the spoils of war, entered on the conquest of western Asia and the Sudan. The plunder of both these regions poured into Egypt.
The God Seth, who had been honored by the Semite races since the time of the Hyksos, and whom they called upon under the name of Baal, had from the earliest times never been allowed a temple on the Nile, as being the God of the stranger; but Rameses in spite of the bold remonstrances of the priestly party who called themselves the 'true believers' raised a magnificent temple to this God in the city of Tanis to supply the religious needs of the immigrant foreigners.
The Kheta, or Hittites, were certainly not Semites, yet the Hyksos names are definitely Semitic. Yet this may have been the case; for the First Dynasty of Babylon, to which the famous Hammurabi belonged, was very probably of Arab origin, to judge by the forms of some of the royal names.
"It is not enough that for five days I have not bathed and know not rose perfumed oil, but besides I must make in one day two forced marches. I am sure that when we reach Memphis no dancer will look at me." "What! Art Thou better than we?" asked the prince. "I am more fragile," said the exquisite. "Thou, prince, art as accustomed to riding as a Hyksos, and Pentuer might travel on a red-hot sword.
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