Google Hyksos

Although I was a under graduate history major, there are lare gaps in my knowlege of things real historians know. One such area is pre-classical. I don't know one Egyptian kingdom from the next, much less one dynasty from another. One thing that vexes me is who were the Hyksos?

Since I already admitted I don't know, you shouldn't place much reliance on what I have to say about them. Historically, they were described by the Egyptians as marauding invaders. I think I somewhere that they overthrew a weak Egyptian dynasty, and established through inter-marriage a dynasty of which Tutankamon was a descendant. But nobody seems certain who they were (where they came from). Some say they were an Asiatic people, migrating down from Central Asia, and using war chariots, which the Egyptians soon copied. Were they part of a Semitic group that also included the Hebrews? But I thought I read somewhere that the etymology of the name suggests they came from the sea.

This mystery came to mind again this week as I read reviews of the book, The Black Athena. The title seems a little sensational to me because I don't think the author posits that sub-Saharan Africans impacted Greek culture in it's formative stages. Rather, I think he's saying that it was those darned Hyksos again. He makes the interesting point that marauders don't impose their own culture on conquered lands, they bring along the superior culture from previous conquests. He points out that the Normans brought French, not Viking culture to England.

Written twenty years ago the book was at first ignored then rebuked by the classical European establishment. The book's author, Bernal, suggests that ethno-centric European historians preferred to theorize that migrants from the north (Aryans) got to Greece, settled in and the Hellenic culture blossomed. I like Bernal's theory because I never understood how Northern Europeans who had migrated into Greece could have brought with them the seeds of Hellenic culture. A pre-Phoenician, semitic people from the coast of the Levant (nowadays Lebanon) could have transmitted the cultue of Asia Minor and the near east around the Mediterrenean (circa 1,600 BC). Question is how they would have changed from war chariots to ships navigating the Mediterrenean in just a hundred years.

Historical evidence to support this hypothesis might in part be scarce, because marauders don't leave a lot of historical records, and when the Romans conquered the Phoenicians (Tyre Sidon and Carthage)in the Punic wars they were pretty thorough about destroying any cultural or historical artifacts that might have provided clues to the pre-phoenician peoples of the region. But I don't know.

So I guess it's time to Google Hyskos (again).