Could it be then that the Sixth Dynasty, the last of the pyramid-builders, was identical to the Hyksos, the Asiatic conquerors who brought a reign of terror to Egypt, and who were finally expelled from the country by the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty? The evidence suggests that this is just the case, and that the entire Pyramid Age needs to be brought down the timescale by many centuries.
The Sixth Dynasty’s origin and rise to power are regarded as being shrouded in the deepest mystery. In the early days of Egyptology scholars were frequently undecided whether kings bearing the name “he of Apep” should be placed with the Old Kingdom Sixth Dynasty or the Hyksos Fifteenth. (See for example H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East (3rd ed., London, 1916) Similarly, they were (and still are) confused as to whether to assign to the First or Second Intermediate Periods a great quantity of material — artifacts and written texts of all kinds — which clearly date from a period of Asiatic domination, but which nevertheless give the names of kings and dignitaries who are otherwise assigned to the Sixth Dynasty. So for example Flinders Petrie noted how scarabs of the Hyksos pharaoh Khyan were stylistically identical to those of Pepi II of the Sixth Dynasty. (Flinders Petrie, A History of Egypt, Vol. 1, p. 119)
The kings of the Sixth Dynasty left a number of very substantial pyramids, the inner chambers of which were inscribed with some of the best and most complete examples of the Pyramid Texts. Most of our knowledge of these texts comes from the Sixth Dynasty monuments. By contrast, no tomb of any Hyksos pharaoh has ever been discovered. (See I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (1961 ed.) p. 243) Yet it seems almost certain that the Hyksos built pyramids, for three structures belonging to the Thirteenth Dynasty (which seems to have been a line of Hyksos clients), two of whom were clearly Asiatic (one called Ameny Amu — Ameny the Asiatic — and another Khendjer), were found at Dahshur and Sakkara. (Ibid., pp. 237-8) But the tombs of the Great Hyksos pharaohs are entirely missing.
There is in fact an abundance of evidence linking the Sixth Dynasty with Asia. To begin with, the name “Hyksos” (rendered in its proper Egyptian title of Hikau-khoswet) first appears in documents of the time. (See W. C. Hayes, “Egypt from the Death of Ammenemes III to Seqenenre II” in The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 2 part 1 (3rd ed.) p. 59) Scholars try to suggest that the “Rulers of Foreign Lands” mentioned in these Sixth Dynasty documents are not the same as the later Asiatic Hyksos, but this explanation is strained.
Secondly, personal adornments and artwork of clearly Asiatic (specifically Mesopotamian) provenance makes their first appearance in Egypt at this time. Chief among the personal adornments are so-called “button badges”, medallion-like talismans worn on a string round the neck. These amulets, usually inscribed with a cruciform design, were popular with a number of Asiatic peoples. During the Sixth Dynasty such amulets became common in Egypt, though most occur in the burials of the petty kings of Dynasties 7 and 8. (Petrie, The Making of Egypt (London, 1939) p. 122) (These latter, who had clearly Semitic names, were, as I show in my Pyramid Age (2007) contemporaries and vassals of the Sixth Dynasty). Button badges, although worn in northern Syria, were particularly associated with Mesopotamia. In the words of Petrie; “… the eight-pointed star is figured on a button in Egypt, exactly like the pattern from Bismya in Sumer.” (Ibid.) Petrie suggested that some of these at least were worn by a bodyguard of foreign soldiers. He regarded the appearance of these ornaments as the material sign of an intrusive population.
Other specific links with Asia are forthcoming: “On a jasper cylinder of Khandy, 2nd king of the VIIth [Seventh] dynasty, he appears as a Syrian king giving life to the Syrian, while the Egyptian stands in the background holding a papyrus stem. The ibexes and guilloche mark this as Syrian work.” (Ibid., p. 123) The conclusion was inescapable; “It is evident … that the Syrian had conquered and held Egypt as a joint kingdom with Syria.” (Ibid.)
There are therefore very strong grounds for believing that during the Sixth Dynasty Egypt was part of a much larger political unit encompassing everything from the Nile valley to the Euphrates, at the very least. Scarabs and other artifacts of Pepi I and Pepi II are found in considerable quantities throughout Syria/Palestine: Yet the evidence shows that Egyptians were not the rulers of this political unit, but the ruled; and that the kings of the Sixth Dynasty were themselves Asiatics who took upon themselves the titles and privileges of pharaohs.
When a nation is subjugated by a foreign power there is generally a complete disruption of the established order. New local administrations are established throughout the conquered territory, whose purpose is to impose the will of the invading power. In short, a feudal-type situation evolves. Strange then that one of the most outstanding features of the Sixth Dynasty was its feudalism. (J. H. Breasted, A History of Egypt (1951 ed.) p. 132) From the very beginning there appeared a new class of local rulers, “Great Lords” of the districts, or “Nomes”, who were completely unknown before, and whose power and authority vied with that of the pharaoh himself. “These nomarchs,” according to Breasted, “…are loyal adherents of the Pharaoh, executing his commissions in distant regions, and displaying the greatest zeal in his cause; but they are no longer his officials merely; nor are they so attached to the court and person of the monarch as to build their tombs around his pyramid. They now have sufficient independence and local attachment to locate their tombs near their own homes.” (Ibid.)
But the nomarchs were not the only local rulers of the epoch. The dislocation of Egyptian society caused by the Asiatic conquest led to political fragmentation and chaos throughout the Nile Valley. Independent or semi-independent states appeared in the various nomes. This fragmentation may have been exacerbated by periodic rebellions, incited by the vicious exploitation that normally accompanies conquest and colonization. Quite probably, high ranking members of the Asiatic ruling class would have been given lordships in the various regions, to use and exploit as they saw fit; much in the manner of the Norman barons after the conquest of England. These “barons”, as I have argued in detail in my Pyramid Age, incited rebellion in the land of the Nile throughout the this period, rebellions that gave rise to numerous “dynasties” which, although placed in sequence in the textbooks, actually reigned simultaneously. Among these lines of “rulers” we may count all those of the First Intermediate Period (Seventh to Eleventh Dynasties), as well as those of the Second (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Dynasties).
As noted above, the Hyksos, as well as the “Old Assyrians”, whom the Mitanni conquered, were both identical to the Akkadians, who occur immediately beneath the Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia. If the Akkadians are the same as the Hyksos, we might expect to find evidence that the former had conquered Egypt.
The evidence exists in plenty.
To begin with, the Akkadian kings actually claimed to have conquered Egypt, a region they named “Magan”. Yet since the Akkadians are supposed to have flourished in the third millennium BC, the conquest of Magan is viewed with the deepest suspicion; and attempts have been made to see in the country some region other than Egypt. Nevertheless, Magan was one of the names normally used to refer to Egypt in later times, and there is one almost incontrovertible piece of evidence to suggest that it also meant Egypt in the Akkadian epoch. This is a series of alabaster vases, noted above, of rather obviously Egyptian manufacture and inscribed with the name of the Akkadian king Naram Sin. The vases, described as “booty of Magan”, initially caused considerable excitement because “Magan was a name undoubtedly applied to Egypt in a later period of Babylonian history, and the vases have a distinct likeness to Egyptian alabaster vases, which more commonly bear inscriptions in the late 5th and 6th Dynasties, the dates of which accord well enough with that of Naram-Sin.” (C. J. Gadd, “The Dynasty of Agade and the Gutian Invasion,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 1, part 2 (3rd ed.) p. 439)
In fact, both Naram-Sin and his grandfather Sargon refer to the subjugation of Magan and Meluhha (the latter usually identified as Ethiopia), and Naram-Sin actually provides the name of the defeated king of Magan — Mannium. This was recognized as strikingly similar to Min/Menes, the name of the first pharaoh, and seemed to add yet more weight to the belief that the Akkadians had conquered the Nile Kingdom. Nevertheless, the King Mannium defeated by Naram Sin was certainly not the same as the First Dynasty Menes and is much more probably identified with Unas (Wenis) of Dynasty Five. (“w” and “m” are easily confused and often interchangeable). If Mannium was indeed Unas of the Fifth Dynasty, this would imply that the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties did not run in sequence, but were largely contemporaneous.
The genealogy of the Memphite priests has a King Sharek as the first of the Hyksos, a title that sounds very close to that of Sharrukin, Sargon the Conqueror.
The name of Sargon of Akkad was to go down in legend. A usurper on the throne, he termed himself sharru-kin (“Legitimate King”) almost by way of proclaiming his right to the crown. Within a short period, Sargon had built an empire the likes of which had never been seen before. He conquered the whole of Mesopotamia and his armies reached westwards towards the Upper Sea (the Mediterranean). He did not stop there, however, for he swept northwards into Anatolia and southwards (if our interpretation of Magan is correct) into Egypt.
Sargon thus stamped his authority over much of the known world; and his successors were to adopt the title, used afterwards by the Medes and Persians, “King of the Four Quarters”. If this is correct, Sargon can be none other than Sharek (Salitis), the Hyksos invader of Egypt. Manetho provides virtually the only account of the Hyksos conquest, and he emphasizes the ease with which the Egyptians were defeated:
Tutimaeus. In his reign, for what cause I know not, a blast of God smote us; and unexpectedly, from the regions of the East, invaders of some obscure race marched in confidence of victory against our land. By main force they easily seized it without striking a blow; and having overpowered the rulers of the land, when they burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of the gods, and treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others. Finally, they appointed as king one of their number whose name was Salitis. He had his seat at Memphis, levying tribute from Upper and Lower Egypt, and always leaving garrisons behind in the most advantageous positions. (Josephus, Against Apion, I, 14)
Manetho hereby gives the impression that the pharaoh of the invasion was Tutimaeus. Yet we shall argue here that Tutimaeus (actually Teti, the name of the first pharaoh of Dynasty 6) was the Egyptian title adopted by the invader, who can be none other than Sargon I.
Two questions are raised at this point. First and foremost, if the Akkadians had really conquered Egypt we must expect them to have introduced a variety of cultural and technological features (aside from a few button-badges and small trinkets) into the Nile Kingdom. The peoples of Mesopotamia were highly-civilized, and were responsible for the invention of some revolutionary new techniques and technologies — not least of which was the wheel. If the Akkadians entered Egypt we must expect them to have brought these things with them.
Secondly, in suggesting that “Hyksos” was the name given by the Egyptians to these Akkadian invaders, we must expect Hyksos cultural features to display their Mesopotamia origin. The Hyksos, we should find, actually spoke Akkadian, worshipped Mesopotamian deities such as Marduk and Ishtar, and possessed a material culture indistinguishable from that of Mesopotamia in the Akkadian epoch. In addition, we would expect Hyksos material to be found in the same stratigraphic levels as the Akkadian.
Let us at this stage look at what the Asiatic invaders brought to Egypt.
Historians are agreed that Sargon’s empire, universally regarded as the world’s first superpower, was built above all with the help of the horse-drawn chariot. The chariot had first appeared amongst the Sumerians in Early Dynastic times, but this was a heavy, cumbersome contraption, four-wheeled and drawn by asses. The evidence is scanty, but it appears fairly clear that the two-wheeled horse-drawn chariot made its appearance in the final stage of Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Age, immediately prior to the rise of the Akkadians. (See Sir Max Mallowan, “The Early Dynastic Period in Mesopotamia,” in The Cambridge ancient History, Vol. 1, part 2 (3rd ed.) p. 269) In the days before cavalry, the chariot was supreme. Foot soldiers simply could not resist an onslaught of massed chariotry.
If the Akkadians used chariots against the infantry of Egypt, that is a fairly straightforward explanation for the ease (emphasized by Manetho) with which they conquered the country.
Yet scholars are unanimous in their belief that the chariot was introduced to Egypt by the Hyksos, who also, supposedly seven hundred years after the Akkadians, used this revolutionary weapon to establish their world empire. That the chariot introduced by the Hyksos was an Akkadian device is strongly suggested by the fact that at least one of the Egyptian words for “chariot”, markabata, is derived from the Akkadian narkabat. (See H. R. Hall, op cit., p. 213) This strongly suggests that the Hyksos spoke Akkadian, a suggestion supported by a whole variety of other evidence to be examined shortly. Furthermore, a host of innovations of Mesopotamian origin, mostly of a military nature, were introduced into Egypt during the Hyksos epoch.
Manetho derived the word “Hyksos” from two Egyptian words which translated as “Shepherd Kings”. Although this etymology is now rejected, there are good grounds for believing that the Ptolemaic scribe had tapped into a genuine Egyptian tradition about the Hyksos, a tradition which somehow linked them with shepherds.
Why link a nation of military conquerors with the humble occupation of the shepherd?
The land most famous in the ancient Near East for its shepherds and sheep was Assyria. A bas-relief on the stairways of the Apadana at Persepolis portrays the subject peoples of the Achaemenid Empire delivering their tribute to king Xerxes. Each region brings the tribute upon which the economic strength of that nation is based. The Lydians, for example, with their long side-locks, deliver measures of gold-dust to the Great King. The Assyrians are there too. They bring fleeces and live sheep. (John Hicks, The Persians (Time Life, 1978) pp. 36-7) The Assyrian kings of the Neo-Assyrian epoch were regularly portrayed wearing robes trimmed with woollen fringes and grasping in their right hands the Assyrian symbol of royal authority and power — the shepherd’s crook. The pharaohs of Egypt also used the shepherd’s crook as a symbol of kingly authority, but its use in this context appears to have been unknown before the Hyksos Age. Who then could have introduced such a royal symbol to Egypt but the sheep-rearing people of northern Mesopotamia, the Assyrian Shepherd Kings?
The links between the Hyksos and Mesopotamia, specifically with the Akkadians of Mesopotamia, are in fact all-pervasive. A granite lion of Khyan, one of the most powerful Hyksos pharaohs, was actually discovered in Baghdad, (W. C. Hayes, loc cit., p. 60) and during their epoch large numbers of cultural innovations, specifically connected with Mesopotamia, were introduced to the Nile Valley. Thus the bronze scimitar, known to have a Mesopotamian origin, was brought to Egypt by the Hyksos. (H. Bonnet, Die Waffen der Volker des alten Orients (Leipzig, 1926) p. 94) A very specific type of cylinder-seal, portraying a bull-headed hero, is associated with the Akkadian epoch; yet such seals appear in Hyksos-age strata in Palestine/Syria. (See Gunnar Heinsohn, “Who were the Hyksos?” Sixth International Congress of Egyptology (Turin, 1191) pp. 10-12) Pottery of the Akkadian age offers precise parallels with Hyksos pottery. (Ibid., pp. 18-20) Architecture of the two peoples, supposedly separated in time by over seven centuries, offers further comparisons. Thus the peculiar defensive triple-gate of the Akkadian Age is copied in exact detail by the Hyksos. (Ibid., pp. 32-5) In the same way, the cults of Ishtar and Bel made their first appearance in Egypt in the time of the Hyksos, whilst many of the Hyksos rulers and officials had names that were quite evidently Semitic.
One of the most enduring legacies of the Hyksos epoch appears to have been the establishment of the Akkadian language as the lingua franca of diplomacy throughout the Near East — a situation that we find already at the beginning of the New Kingdom. The famous Amarna documents, for example, show Syrian vassal kings of Amenhotep III and Akhnaton corresponding with their master by means of letters written in Akkadian — an Akkadian strikingly similar to that used by Sargon I and Naram Sin. Even Mesopotamian diplomatic protocols are preserved, with royal correspondences written in cuneiform upon clay tablets and concealed within clay envelopes.
Amongst Egyptologists the question of who taught the Egyptians the Akkadian language is still one that prompts lively debate. Yet proof positive that the Hyksos used Akkadian, and were therefore almost certainly the nation responsible for making it the language of commerce and diplomacy throughout Palestine/Syria, came with the discovery at Hazor in Israel of some jugs of Hyksos date, one of which bore an inscription in Akkadian cuneiform. “Three jugs belonging to Middle Bronze Age II were found in situ in Locus 6175. On one of them (C339/1) an inscription was found incised in cuneiform, the earliest in this script to be discovered hitherto in Palestine.” (Ibid., p. 31) It was understood that “the historical conclusions connected with the fact that the grammatical form of the name is Akkadian and not Western Semitic” would be far-reaching. One scholar noted that “it is instructive that the first element of the name, whose reading is plain, has the Akkadian form is-me (i.e., ‘he has heard’) and not the West Semitic form one would expect: iasmah, as in the name Iasmah-Adad known from Mari.” (A. Malamat, “Hazor, ‘The Head of all those Kingdoms,’” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. LXXIX (1960) p. 18)
Thus the experts expressed their puzzlement and discomfort at the apparently anomalous and anachronistic appearance of the Akkadian language amongst the Hyksos.
All in all, the evidence increasingly demonstrates that the Hyksos were a mighty and cultured people, closely connected to Mesopotamia, and not the ignorant barbarians portrayed by the Egyptians. They described themselves as “Rulers of Nations” — a term held to be “suggestive of worldwide domination”. (W. C. Hayes, loc cit., p. 61) Strange indeed that such an awesome imperial power should have escaped the attention of everyone but the Egyptians! Not only were they great conquerors, their technological innovations are now justly recognized. “Through their Hyksos adversaries the Egyptians probably first became acquainted with the composite bow, bronze daggers and swords of improved type, and other advances in the equipment and technique of war, as well as with some of the important western Asiatic innovations in the arts of peace which are encountered in Egypt for the first time under the Eighteenth Dynasty.” (Ibid., p. 57) Such benefits of civilization could force only one conclusion about those responsible; “However we may evaluate them, they were evidently not the ruthless barbarians conjured up by the Theban propagandists of the early New Kingdom and the Egyptian writers of later periods.” (Ibid., p. 55)
So the Hyksos epoch was one of high civilization. Fresh ideas from the east flooded into Egypt, and we cannot doubt that international trade, as well as diplomacy, was a characteristic of the age. Literature — in the form of the “Prophetic” and “Pessimistic” treatises — flourished, as did art and architecture. The Hyksos kings (if our identification of the Sixth Dynasty is correct) built great monuments throughout Egypt, and they poured substantial resources into beautifying the nation’s temples and shrines. Put simply, the archaeological record demonstrates that Egyptian civilization suffered not at all from the Hyksos occupation, and that, on the contrary, it was greatly enriched by the infusion of Asiatic influence.
Where, it has been asked again and again, could such a powerful and civilized nation have originated? The answer, in every conceivable way, points to Mesopotamia. But the Hyksos monarchs did not reign in the 16th century BC, as conventional scholarship supposes; they reigned in the 8th: And their Akkadian language was also that of the mighty nation of warriors whom the classical authors tell us ruled most of the Near East during this epoch: the Assyrians.
It thus seems clear that the Sixth Dynasty was identical to the Hyksos and to the Akkadians or “Old Assyrians,” conquered by the Mitanni/Medes. This in turn means that the Sixth Dynasty immediately preceded the Eighteenth, and that the entire Old Kingdom needs to be brought forward by many centuries. Since the Eighteenth Dynasty rulers were themselves contemporaries – and allies – of the Mitanni, or Medes, their Sixth Dynasty (Hyksos) opponents must have been expelled from Egypt around 700 BC.
We are thus involved in a shortening of chronology much more radical than anything imagined even by Velikovsky.