EARLY DISTRIBUTION OF HORSES. 37 



what is known of the Hyksos. Some have claimed they were from 

 Chaldea, some from Northern Syria and Asia Minor, and some 

 again from Phoenicia, and it is one of the strangest things in his- 

 tory that a great nation should be overthrown and held in sub- 

 jection for over five hundred years and nobody know who did it. 

 Then again, it is equally incomprehensible that any nation should 

 have subdued Egypt and held it in bondage so long and yet never 

 have claimed the honor of having done so. Still another mystery 

 remains that never has been solved, and that is, what became of 

 the Shepherds and their followers when they were driven out? 

 At the period of the conquest the governing class was rent by 

 factions and under a weak and tyrannical king. The Delta and 

 the Valley of the Nile were crowded with slaves, many of them 

 of Asiatic origin. The elevated plains and mountain sides were 

 covered with fierce and intractable nomads, all of Asiatic origin, 

 tending their flocks. Some brave and skillful shepherd organized 

 the shepherds and the slaves and at their head swept down upon 

 the government with a power that was so mighty as to be irre- 

 sistible. Manetho, the great Egyptian historian of more than 

 two thousand years ago, thus describes the event: * 'Under this 

 king, then, I know not wherefore, the god caused to blow upon 

 us a baleful wind, and in the face of all probability bands from 

 the East, people of ignoble race, came upon us unawares, at- 

 tacked the country and subdued it easily and without fighting." 

 In remarking upon this same event Professor. Maspero, who stands 

 at the very head of the Egyptologists, says: "It is possible that they 

 (the shepherds) owed this rapid victory to the presence in their 

 armies of a factor hitherto unknown to the Africans the war 

 chariot and before the horse and his driver the Egyptians gave 

 way in a body." In view of the direct declaration of Manetho 

 that the question of the succession was settled "without fight- 

 ing," the mere suggestion of an unsustained "possibility" from 

 Maspero that the result may have been determined by the war 

 chariots cannot be accepted. All the authorities agree that the 

 horse was introduced into Egypt at some period during the rule 

 of the Shepherd Kings, but there is absolutely no evidence that 

 this was at the beginning or anywhere near the beginning of that 

 rule. 



No records or delineations of the horse have been found in any 

 of the temples or tombs of Egypt prior to the beginning of the 

 eighteenth dynasty, which was probably about the year 1570 B.C. 



