How The Hyksos Invasion Of Ancient Egypt Changed History

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com -  In 1650 B.C., Egypt was invaded by a group of foreigners who, according to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, called themselves Hyksos.

The Hyksos were a mixed West Asian people. The Hyksos established a powerful empire across much of ancient Egypt that lasted over 100 years before the pharaoh Kamose, the last king of the Theban Seventeenth Dynasty, launched a war of liberation from his seat of power in southern Egypt.

Ahmose I and Tablet Records. Credit: Wikipedia - Brooklyn Museum - CC BY-SA 2.5

Josephus mistranslated Hyksos as "Shepherd Kings," but Hyksos was most likely an Egyptian term for “rulers of foreign lands” (heqa-khase), and it almost certainly designated the foreign dynasts rather than an ethnic group. Modern scholarship has identified most of the Hyksos kings’ names as Semitic.

The Hyksos occupation was later described as a highly traumatic event for the Egyptian people. Still, it is unclear whether this was the view of contemporary Egyptians living under their control.

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See also: 

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