234 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



dominant always, if only by reason of the formidable engine of 

 war, the chariot and horses, which they introduced to Western 

 Asia," and they regard as Mongolian the master race in " the 

 hordes of Semite-Hittites," which according to them constituted 

 the Hyksos^ It must be remembered that although the story 

 of the purchase of the Cave of Machpelah by Abraham from 

 Ephron the Hittite is one of our few reliable documents relating 

 to that people, and though the children of Heth are represented 

 as dwelling in Canaan and as being the occupants of the land 

 before the coming of Abraham, yet there is not the slightest 

 evidence that they any more than Abraham possessed a single 

 horse. Again, if they were Mongols who had come down 

 through Armenia and brought the horse with them into Egypt, 

 the horses seen on the Egyptian monuments ought to resemble 

 the horses of upper Asia in colour, form, and fashion of carrying 

 the tail, in all which points they differ completely, as has been 

 already pointed out. Finally, if Jensen is right in his view, 

 that the Hittites were Indo-Europeans and spoke a language 

 akin to Armenian (p. 214), this would be fatal to a Mongolian 

 origin for that people. 



The balance of evidence is thus clearly in favour of the 

 Hyksos being Semites and neither Mongols nor Indo-Europeans; 

 it may be even worth while to consider whether Manetho's 

 account of the Hyksos' occupation of Egypt may not actually 

 refer to the story of the Hebrew immigration into and their 

 subsequent expulsion from that country. The traditional dates 

 for Abraham and Jacob fall within the period during which, 

 according to the computations of modern Egyptologists, the 

 Hyksos were settled or settling in Egypt. We may even point 

 out that if we date the exodus about B.C. 1400 — 1850 and 

 reckon back five hundred years — the duration of the Hyksos 

 period according to Manetho — we arrive at about B.C. 1900 — 

 1850, the traditional date for the migration of Abraham into 

 Egypt. The coincidence in date is very striking, and it is not 

 very probable that two sets of shepherd immigrants, who are repre- 

 sented as living in the same part of Egypt, as leaving Egypt 



^ Op. cit. p. G6. 



