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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The name Moses given to him by a non-Jewish woman is probably a Semitic word but then how on earth was a Semitic the language spoken in the pharaoh’s household? Did the Amalekites/Hyksos seize power in Egypt even before what Dr. Velikovsky calculates?
Dear Varghese
well the web is crawling with Israeli paid and funded Hasbara who spend all their time on the internet advancing rabbinical incoherent ranting
Moses is like Tuthmoses, Ahmoses, Kamoses, or Ra-Moses( Rameses), which means ‘Ra is born’.
You missed my point so I will make it again, The Amalekites are mentioned in genesis 14 which discusses the battle of four kings, at the time of Abraham and Lot, and so Esau’s grandson would have been Abraham’s great great grandson, so how could the Amalekites be descended from Esau? It is moribund stupidity.
The Hyksos were defeated circa 1550 BC, the Exodus occurred about a century after. The mythical Amalekite ocupation of rabbinical writings has zero documentation outside of late rabbinical speculaions, which pay no attention to chronology
The Amalekites in Samuel were portrayed as living about the Negev. Trying to say that they were in Egypt post 1500 BC is pure speculation. The Talmudical myths ignore the chronology of the Bible.
The Rabbinical tradition of Amalek is a deeply racist one, ill founded and clearly advanced by Jewish race supremacists/Zionists who want an excuse to treat Gentiles as sub-humans.
There is no connection to Haman from the Book of Esther. All the earliest copies of Esther say Haman was a Bugaen not an Agagite. The idea of separate races was invented by the Gnostic Basiledes in the second century AD. The idea in the Rabbinical writings that Gentiles are ‘animal people’, is from Greek Paganism, not Judaism.
You have not listened to the voice of the Prophets, Jesus said
“The measure you give is the measure you will get!”
So the first will be last and the last will be first.
God blessed Abraham in order to bless the Gentiles, he did not have genocide, extortion, slavery, usury, prostitution, drug addiction, pedophilia, organ-harvesting of innocents in mind at all.
What do you think Jesus meant when he said, ‘The Temple was meant for a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers’
The Bible says that all men are brothers, and with your evil inventions you try to distort the word of God to serve your utter wickedness.
I just wanted to say — HAYQ/HAYK was another name of Armenian Kingdom (greek) they called them HYQSOS because they were from HAYQ/HAYK (Armenia). Today Armenians call each other HAY in honor of HAYK/HAYQ Father of Armenians.
The Hyksos (Hebrews) were both rules and slaves.
There were rulers such as Joseph and Moses in Egypt.
There were also slaves.
The Hyksos in studies today show they were and or related to the ancient Armenians and this is where the Hebrew race originated, in the Armenian Highlands.
You think the Commandments were written on stone because the Bible says they were written on stone?
Neither the Hebrews nor the Israelites whom they became (nor Jews today) were a race.
The Exodus story was written almost 1,000 years after it happened. Slavery in Egypt was a byproduct of not having a prison system to house criminals and POWs. The pyramids were built more than a thousand years before the hyksos invasion. This is my theory.
The semites in that picture were arrested for aiding foreign invaders. They were enslaved for a period to work in the mines. They revolted and left. They later founded the Abrahamic faith but they were illiterate so they didn’t write anything down. They just told the story and over the years the story changed. By the time they wrote the stuff down they propagandized themselves as slaves who built the pyramids and were liberated by god through while a series of real plagues and turmoil distracted the Egyptians long enough and well enough to help them escape.
I’m still not sure why folks are repeating what the bible is saying about that time as valid history. It’s revisionist and like Beaver has said and what most scholars agree on is written much later.
The ‘traditional’ date of the exodus is somewhere between about 1450 bce and 1650 bce, depending on how one treats the chronological references. It bothers me that an otherwise reputable source would refer to the very modern 1200’s date for the exodus as if it’s ‘traditional’ rather than a modern scholar’s hypothesis (and a poor one at that, as it matches neither the ancient supporting documents nor the archaeology).
If you work with the popular 1446 BC date of the exodus, the report of Manetho fits remarkably well into the bible story: The descendants of Abraham had been a favoured clan under the rule of the pharaohs of the Fifteenth, the Hyksos, dynasty. When those were kicked out in the 16th century BC, Abrahams people were allowed to remain, but lost status. Ahmosos was “the pharaoh that did not know Joseph”. Over the next hundred years the new Egyptian pharaohs increased pressure on the remaining Semitic tribes. After all, they had to prevent a new hostile takeover like the one the Hyksos had pulled of once. When eventually Moses lead out his people, they found the promised land Canaan already full of strong tribes and their cities. Among those the Hyksos in Jerusalem, which fell to the Israelites only much later.
If the Hyksos were the Amalekites, the Bible states that God (which is to say, the priests of the Israelites) commanded the Israelites to slaughter them down to the last child and destroy all their livestock. When King Saul hesitated to complete this genocide by murdering the Amalekite king, and chose to keep at least some of the Amalekites’ animals alive, he is chastised and very nearly stripped of his kingship. (1 Samuel 15)
It amazes me how ignorant are people who wrote most of the above comments. If they would read the Hebrew Bible and then read Velikovsky they would know that the Hyksos/Amu/Amalekites were most certainly NOT not the Israelite. It is clear to anyone who reads instead of just writing anything which come into their “minds”,. they would see that at the same moment as the Israelites were escaping from Egypt in the Exodus they were cowardly attacked from the rear by the Hyksos/ Amu/Amalekites. The Israelites were heading AWAY from Egypt while the Amalekites/Hyksos were heading TO Egypt. That gives the relative direction of movement as well as the chronology.
Incidentally, who says that the Israelites were illiterate? They were NOT slaves but BONDMEN in much the same way as mediaeval serfs were in Christian Europe 3000 years later. Earlier, Joseph was the Household Manager so must have kept accounts. Some of the bondmen worked in quarries, others probably in architectural offices and were surveyors. They – or many of them – were literate. 400 hundred years later The Ten Commandments were WRITTEN on stone for all to read as well as to hear. The Bible began to be written so that fathers could teach it to their sons. That was long before it was canonised.
The date, incidentally, of the Exodus was 1550 BCE and the date of the overthrow of the Hyksos/Amalekites was some 400 years later under King Saul. READ ALL ABOUT IT before writing your uninformed comments.
Mervyn
What about 1 kings 6:1?