After the 12th Dynasty, the many short-lived kings of the 13th Dynasty still held much of Egypt for a time. In the eastern Delta, though, people from western Asia had been settling for generations. Around c. 1650 BC, rulers from among them took power over the north. Egyptians called them ḥqꜣw ḫꜣswt, "rulers of foreign lands", which Greek writers turned into Hyksos.
Key idea
What the digging shows
Since 1966 Manfred Bietak's excavations at Tell el-Dabʿa, ancient Avaris, have shown a town where people with Levantine customs lived from the late Middle Kingdom on: houses of Near Eastern type, Middle Bronze Age pottery and weapons, and burials with donkeys. The town grew over generations before the Hyksos kings ruled from it.
How did they come to power?
Here historians disagree. Manetho, quoted by Josephus centuries later, describes a sudden invasion. Many scholars now think of a gradual rise: settlers, traders and soldiers in the Delta whose leaders took power when the 13th Dynasty weakened, perhaps with some fighting. Others think new groups arriving from the Levant played a bigger part. The evidence fits a long presence, with the exact way power changed hands still debated.
Why it works
Worked example: A sign of Egyptian culture
- The papyrus is written in Egyptian hieratic and dated by a Hyksos king's reign.
- So Egyptian scribes worked under the Hyksos and dated their work by them.
- Hyksos rulers used Egyptian administration and culture rather than replacing it.
Answer: That Egyptian scribal culture continued under Hyksos kings, who were treated as rulers of Egypt.
New things came into Egypt in this period too: horses and chariots, and new kinds of weapons, which the New Kingdom army would use to great effect.
Common mistake