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Sculptors began by clothing the successors of Alexander in Egyptian garb and transforming them into Pharaohs, just as they had in olden time transformed the Hyksos and the Persians. Works dating from the reigns of the first Ptolemies scarcely differ from those of the best Saïte period, and it is only here and there that we detect traces of Greek influence.
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.
About 2500 B.C. The face is of the well-known hard and lined type which is seen also in the portraits of Amenemhat III, and was formerly considered to be that of the Hyksos. Messrs. We have seen, however, that there is very little foundation for this view, and it is more than probable that this peculiar physiognomy is of a type purely Egyptian in character.
The cities and temples were restored and beautified, and art began to flourish once more. Except in one respect it became difficult to distinguish the Hyksos prince from his predecessors on the throne of Egypt. That one respect was religion. The supreme object of Hyksos worship continued to be Sutekh, the Baal of Western Asia, whose cult the foreigners had brought with them from their old homes.
Zoan or Tanis, the modern San, became the residence of the court: here the Hyksos kings were in close proximity to their kindred in Asia, and were, moreover, removed from the unmixed Egyptian population further south. Their rule was assisted by the mutual jealousies and quarrels of the native feudal princes who shared between them the land of Egypt.
The people who fought against Cambyses were not the race that 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.
These surged out of Arabia, eternal motherland of vigorous migrants, in the middle centuries of the third millennium B.C. While this migration swamped South Syria with "Canaanites," it ultimately gave to Egypt the Hyksos or "Shepherd Kings," to Assyria its permanent Semitic population, and to Sumer and Akkad what later chroniclers called the First Babylonian Dynasty.
During this season Professor Petrie made important discoveries in relation to the obscure Hyksôs dominion in Egypt. Many representations of these Shepherd Kings were found, and, from their physiognomy, it was judged that they were not Semites, but rather Mongols or Tatars, who probably came from the same part of Asia as the Mongul hordes of Genghis Khan.
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.
It was supposed that the remarkable faces of the sphinxes of Tanis, now in the Cairo Museum, which bore the names of Hyksos kings, were of Mongolian type, as also those of two colossal royal heads discovered by M. Naville at Bubastis. But M. Golénischeff has now shown that these heads are really those of XIIth Dynasty kings, and not of Hyksos at all. Messrs.
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