Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 233 



As the true Hyksos dynasty was only established at a 

 period long posterior to the first coming of the folk them- 

 selves, we may infer that their occupation of Egypt was 

 a process of gradual infiltration, and was not effected by 

 any organised invasion under some great king, but rather 

 by the constant arrival of fresh clans, who made their way 

 across the desert with their flocks. In the stories of Abraham 

 and Jacob we have excellent illustrations of the manner in 

 which Arab sheikhs with their followers and flocks and herds 

 kept percolating not only into Palestine but even into Egypt 

 itself at the very epoch when the Shepherd chiefs are said by 

 Manetho to have been dominant in the latter country. The 

 migration of Abraham into Egypt, which according to the tradi- 

 tional chronology took place about B.C. 1900, and that of his 

 grandson Jacob about a century later, well exemplify the infiltra- 

 tion of Semitic clans not as yet combined under any one great 

 king, and are in complete harmony with the manner in which 

 the Hyksos seem to have gradually got their hold upon the land 

 of the Nile. 



Writing of the Hyksos, Prof Flinders Petrie remarks that "we 

 cannot improve on the origin of the name given by Manetho, 

 hyk or heq, a prince, and sos or shasu, the generic name of the 

 shepherds or pastoral races of the eastern deserts. On later 

 monuments the Shasu are represented as typical Arabs\" This 

 usage of heq is, like that of the heq setu or " chief of the deserts," 

 the title of the Semitic Absha in the xiith dynasty, and of 

 Khyan before him. The evidence of the physiognomy of many 

 statues and sphinxes which have been attributed to this period 

 has been adduced by certain writers in favour of a non-Semitic 

 or Mongolic origin for the Hyksos, but these monuments are 

 now regarded as being probably far older than the Hyksos 

 period '\ 



Messrs Newbury and Garstang^ have recently identified 

 the Hyksos with the Kheta or Hittites, whom they describe 

 as " a mixed Asiatic people moving westward, mingling freely 

 with the tribes and peoples whose country they overran, but 



^ History of Egypt, Vol. i. p. 237. ^ Meyer cited by Petrie, loc. cit. 



* A Short History of Ancient Egypt, p. 65 (1904). 



