The Expulsion of the Hyksos
Tel Habuwa excavations reveal the conquest of Tjaru by Ahmose I
“After the conclusion of the treaty they left with their families and chattels, not fewer than two hundred and forty thousand people, and crossed the desert into Syria. Fearing the Assyrians, who dominated over Asia at that time, they built a city in the country which we now call Judea. It was large enough to contain this great number of men and was called Jerusalem.”
–Josephus, Against Apion 1.73.7, quoting Manetho’s Aegyptiaca
Excavations at Tel Habuwa, thought to be ancient Tjaru, reveal evidence of the expulsion of the Hyksos by Ahmose I at the end of the Second Intermediate Period.
In the Second Intermediate Period (18th–16th centuries B.C.E.), towards the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the West Asian (Canaanite) Hyksos controlled Lower (Northern) Egypt. In the 16th century, Ahmose I overthrew the Hyksos and initiated the XVIII dynasty and the New Kingdom of Egypt.
Archaeological discoveries at Tel Habuwa (also known as Tell el-Habua or Tell-Huba), a site associated with ancient Tjaru (Tharo), shed light on Ahmose’s campaign. A daybook entry in the famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus notes that Ahmose seized control of Tjaru before laying siege the Hyksos at their capital in Avaris.
Excavations at the site, located two miles east of the Suez Canal, have uncovered evidence of battle wounds on skeletons discovered in two-story administrative structures dating to the Hyksos and New Kingdom occupations. The site showed evidence of burned buildings, as well as massive New Kingdom grain silos that would have been able to feed a large number of Egyptian troops. After Ahmose took the city and defeated the Hyksos, he expanded the town and built several nearby forts to protect Egypt’s eastern border. Tjaru was first discovered in 2003, but until now, the excavation only uncovered the New Kingdom military fort and silos. This new discovery confirms a decisive moment in the expulsion of the Hyksos previously known from textual sources.
Tomb painting from Beni Hasan, Egypt. A figure named Abisha and identified by the title Hyksos leads brightly garbed Semitic clansmen into Egypt to conduct trade. Dating to about 1890 B.C.E., the painting is preserved on the wall of a tomb carved into cliffs overlooking the Nile at Beni Hasan, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor. In the early second millennium B.C.E., numerous Asiatics infiltrated Egypt, some of whom eventually gained control over Lower Egypt for about a century and a half. The governing class of these people became known as the Hyksos, which means “Rulers of Foreign Lands.”
The Hyksos are well known from ancient texts, and their expulsion was recorded in later ancient Egyptian historical narratives. The third-century B.C.E. Egyptian historian Manetho–whose semi-accurate histories stand out as valuable resources for cataloging Egyptian kingship–wrote of the Hyksos’ violent entry into Egypt from the north, and the founding of their monumental capital at Avaris, a city associated with the famous excavations at Tell ed-Dab’a. After the Hyksos were expelled from Egypt, Manetho reports that they wandered the desert before establishing the city of Jerusalem.
FREE ebook: Ancient Israel in Egypt and the Exodus.
While Josephus cites Manetho’s history associating the Israelites with the Hyksos, many modern scholars see problems with Manetho’s conflation of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the Biblical narrative. Manetho lived many centuries after these events took place, and he may have combined two different narratives, wittingly or unwittingly, when associating the Hyksos and Israelites. Ahmose’s defeat of the Hyksos occurred centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus. In addition, the basic premise of the Hyksos and Exodus histories differ: the Hyksos were expelled rulers of Egypt, not slaves, and they were forced out, not pursued.
Learn more about the fortress excavated at Tel Habuwa—the largest discovered to date in Egypt.
The expulsion of the Hyksos may not have been a single event, and many still read Manetho’s texts on the Hyksos expulsion as a record of the Israelites’ Exodus. After the Hyksos were defeated by Ahmose, some Hyksos people likely remained in Egypt, perhaps as a subjugated class. The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut (1489–1469 B.C.E.) recorded the banishment of a group of Asiatics from Avaris, the former Hyksos capital. While this second expulsion would still have been centuries before the traditional date of the Exodus, there may exist parallels between these events and the Exodus narrative, or the earlier Biblical accounts of Abraham, Sarah and Lot’s own expulsion from Egypt in Genesis 12:19.
This Bible History Daily feature was originally published in March 2013.
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I think things are very clear Abraham left Babylonia because of his discrepancies regarding idol worship with King Nimrod because he was a Noahide that followed the seven laws given by God to Noah after the deluge. He left with Eliezer the Babylonian King son with could be interpreted as a support of the King to Abraham because nothing happened in Babylonia unless approved by the King that was very powerful, Then he goes to Canaan current Palestine and descends to Egypt for food telling the Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister after discovering the truth he asks Abraham to leave the country and gives him Aghar his daughter as his maid servant, having a son with her Ishmael. So the two most powerful Kings of the world gave him his son and daughter respectfully that could mean that they supported him in his mission of spreading the seven laws of Noah in all the region. The Amalekites descended directly from Amalek the son of Timna that was rejected by Jacob and that had to marry her father where the hate against the tribes of Jacob began and then when they left Egypt under the leadership of Moses that was a Pharaoh probably Aknaton that changed the Egyptian religion from polytheism to monotheism was ambushed by them.
I am happy to see others citing Velkovsky, as his research of other civilizations from around the world, proves that a major cosmic disaster happened circa 1495 BCE. This is the date of the Exodus, when the Israelites left Egypt, as can be calculated by working back from 587/6 BCE – the known date of the Babylonian conquest of Judah.
As previous posters have said, this disaster allowed the Hyskos [Amalekites] to take over Egypt.
It was King Saul who defeated the Amalekites, much later. 1 Samuel 14:48
I place Joseph becoming vizir under Ahmose I after he ousted the Hyksos (which means “foreign rulers”). I think the Hyksos were miners originally from Byblos, who desired home cooking and so they became shepherds. Since the southern Egyptians were oppressed by these shepherd kings, they hated shepherds. Joseph made a point of this to his brothers when they arrived.
“31And Joseph said to his brothers, and to his father’s house, I will go up, and show Pharaoh, and say to him, My brothers, and my father’s house, which were in the land of Canaan, are come to me; 32And the men are shepherds, for their trade has been to feed cattle; and they have brought their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have. 33And it shall come to pass, when Pharaoh shall call you, and shall say, What is your occupation? 34That you shall say, Your servants’ trade has been about cattle from our youth even until now, both we, and also our fathers: that you may dwell in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.” (Genesis 46:31-34)
Also, Tell el-Daba (Avaris) has dozens of large temporary silos after the conquest of Ahmose I.
I place Rameses I as the pharaoh of the exodus.
As The Encyclopedia Americana (1956, Vol. 14, p. 595) says: “The only detailed account of them [the Hyksos] in any ancient writer is an unreliable passage of a lost work of Manetho, cited by Josephus in his rejoinder to Apion.” Statements attributed by Josephus to Manetho are the source of the name Hyksos. Interestingly, Josephus, claiming to quote Manetho verbatim, presents Manetho’s account as directly connecting the Hyksos with the Israelites. Josephus, it seems, accepts this connection but argues vehemently against many of the details of the account. He seems to prefer the rendering of Hyksos as “captive shepherds” rather than “king-shepherds.” Manetho, according to Josephus, presents the Hyksos as conquering Egypt without a battle, destroying cities and “the temples of the gods,” and causing slaughter and havoc. They are represented as settling in the Delta region. Finally the Egyptians are said to have risen up, fought a long and terrible war, with 480,000 men, besieged the Hyksos at their chief city, Avaris, and then, strangely, reached an agreement allowing them to leave the country unharmed with their families and possessions, whereupon they went to Judea and built Jerusalem.—Against Apion, I, 73-105 (14-16); 223-232 (25, 26).
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200001265#h=55:0-55:1255
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/s/r1/lp-e?q=Hyksos&p=par
Two key pieces of information in the Bible serve as clues pointing to the identity of the Hyksos with the Amalekites. One is the finding of an Egyptian, servant to an Amalekite, in 1 Samuel 15. What is an Egyptian, son of the powerful nation of Egypt, doing as a servant to an Amalekite, of a relatively weak nation? But this would make sense if the Amalekites were the Hyksos who ruled Egypt, for then it would have been normal for Amalekites to have Egyptian servants. Velikovsky discussed this in his 1952 ‘Ages in Chaos’. Second is David’s conversation with a young man who identifies himself as the son of a stranger [foreigner or alien], an Amalekite (2 Samuel 1:14). This young man does not need to call himself a foreigner; it is obvious that he is a foreigner if he is an Amalekite. However, the Hyksos were known as Foreign Rulers or Rulers of Foreign Lands. His identifying himself as a foreigner may have been a way of saying that he is one of the Hyksos. These two clues point to the need for a revised chronology in which Hyksos rule in Egypt is down-dated to roughly the late second millenium BC.
Jerusalem was a city with a thousand year history when the Jews conquered it. It is stupid to of them to be cited as ‘founding’ Jerusalem.
Uh…after reading the article, this has all the hallmarks of ‘scientistic’ archaeology. In Maksoud’s publications he briefly mentions that there is some occupation of the site during the 2nd Int. Period but he did not note that there was intense burning at the site. All the structures referred to date to the reign of Thutmose III and the 19th Dynasty. The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus only that a ruler had taken Tjaru (‘that king from the North entered it’) which has led many to date this to the reign of Apophis in the Delta – it is possible that the Thebans did attack the site but the archaeological evidence for this is not clear in publications of Tell Heboua so far…
According to the article entitled: Dating the war of the Hyksos https://www.academia.edu/2414447
The three Hyksos dynasties (XIV, XV, XVI) ruled Egypt approximately from 1750 to 1530 BCE and then disappear abruptly after the death of Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa. One can notice that Egyptian documents unanimously describe the departure of the Hyksos from Egypt to Palestine in a disaster. Modern Egyptologists pictured a ‘war of the Hyksos’, however no document speaks of war but only that Avaris, Hyksos’ capital, was looted and vandalized after their departure. Moreover all accounts of former historians picture the Hyksos as the ancestors of the Hebrews, led into Palestine under the leadership of Moses. In addition both biblical and Egyptian chronologies date the Hyksos departure in 1533 BCE, which implies the coincidence of these two dramatic events. The only way to date the so-called “Hyksos’ war” is: gathering all historical and archaeological documents about the Hyksos, establishing a relative chronology of the “Hyksos’ war”, identifying who was Apopi and his links with the biblical Moses, determining from where came the Hyksos and where did they go, dating the Hyksos war according to the Egyptian chronology through synchronisms dated by astronomy and dating the Exodus according to the Israelite chronology (based on masoretical text) checked by absolute dates.
According to Egyptian accounts the last king of the XVth dynasty, named Apopi, “very pretty” in Hebrew that is Moses’ birth name (Exodus 2:2), reigned 40 years in Egypt from 1613 to 1573 BCE. 40 years later Apopi met Seqenenre Taa the last pharaoh of the XVIIth dynasty and gave him an unspecified disturbing message. The eldest son of Seqenenre Taa, Ahmose Sapaïr, who was crown prince died in a dramatic and unexplained way shortly before his father. Seqenenre Taa died in May 1533 BCE, after 11 years of reign, in dramatic and unclear circumstances. The state of his mummy proves, however, that his body received severe injuries and remained abandoned for several days before being mummified (see Psalms 136:15). Prince Kamose, Seqenenre Taa’s brother, assured interim of authority for 3 years and threatened attack the former pharaoh Apopi, new prince of Retenu (Palestine). In the stele of the Tempest he also blames Apopi for all the disasters that come to fall upon Egypt which caused many deaths.
The identification of the Hyksos with the Israelites, seems fairly obvious.
The chronology, arrival in Egypt after 2000 BC, about 400 years, then the exodus/expulsion (depending on ones point of view) circa 1500 BC, agrees with the 400 years in Egypt, and the 480 years from the Exodus to the building of Solomon’s temple.
The theory that the Hyksos were Amalekites is more or less insane because by all accounts the Hyksos period ended shortly before the Exodus. That apocryphal Amalekite-Hyksos rule must have occured during the time of Joshua and the Judges, and there is exactly no evidence for anything like it, that time period was the New Kingdom, and the resurgent Egyptian rule under the 18th and 19th dynasties.
On could suppose that the Hyksos were Amalekites if they came around the time or after Joseph, but they are in stiff competition with other cantidates, like the Hurrians, Kassites, Hittites, Amorites, Philistines, etc that are advanced by different groups depending on their philosophy.
The theory that the amalekites were descended from Esau is Rabbinical nonsense. It is not in the Bible it is read into the Bible.
they were in genesis 14 at the time of abraham, so how can they be descended from his great great grandson?
Esau’s grandson was named after the Amalekites. Not vice versa.
lars persona
Hi Lars:
Bible does say that Amalek descended from Esau. Here is the quote for you.
“Timna was concubine to Eliphaz Esau’s son; and she bare to Eliphaz Amalek: these are the sons of Adah, Esau’s wife.” — Genesis 36:12
I have to say that it appears to me that people who support “Amalek=Hyksos” theory are much more bible literate, able to think for them selves and less anti-Semitic.