Hyksos Research in Egyptology and Egypt's Public Imagination

Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 73–86

brill.com/jeh

Hyksos Research in Egyptology and Egypt’s Public Imagination: A Brief Assessment of Fifty Years of Assessments

Thomas Schneider University of British Columbia [email protected]

Abstract

This contribution will look at the impact that the discovery of the site of Tell el-Dabʿa (Avaris), the capital of the Hyksos, has had on the discipline of Egyptology—in other words, to assess in what ways the disciplinary and public narrative about the Hyksos Period has (or has not) changed as a consequence of the discovery of Avaris.1 It will become clear that the cultural specifics of Avaris and its historical place have had a varied reception, and that the diverging representations that can be encountered pay tribute to different strategies of acceptance or denial that perpetuate certain traditions of scholarly and public engagement with ancient Egypt.

Keywords

Avaris – Tell el-Dabʿa – ethnicity – Hyksos Period

1 Introduction

In his introduction to the recent volume “Histories of Egyptology. Inter disciplinary measures,” William Carruthers has pointed to the inherent instability of Egyptology—the instability of modern knowledge about ancient

1 The following ideas were first presented at the symposium “50 Years at Tell el-Dabʿa and a Kick-off for the ERC Advanced Grant ‘The Hyksos Enigma’ ” during the 10th ICAANE, Vienna, 25th–29th April, 2016. I am grateful to Manfred Bietak for the ability to publish the contribution within this thematic issue of the Journal of Egyptian History.

Egypt.2 He has emphasized how we can infer from the manners in which disciplined knowledge about ancient Egypt has been made, represented, con- tested, and circulated, how socially and historically contingent this knowledge has been not on actual evidence from Egypt, but modern contexts.3 In this regard, the fact that the culture excavated at Avaris did not easily fall in line with existing categories conventionally used for Egyptian civilization, but rather questioned those categories, seems to have made its reception in the field more complex, or in positive terms, prevented a reception within the discipline that in other cases continues to be obligated to Egyptomania and not Egyptology. Moreno Garcia has recently criticized the “reactionary utopia” of an “Eternal Egypt” implicitly espoused in much scholarship.4 This myth has also buttressed the modern colonial control of Egypt, from Western colonialism to the informal colonialism in modern Egypt, as Langer has demonstrated.5 In this context, it is noteworthy that when the French archaeological mission at Saqqara celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013, it appeared fitting to refer to it as “50 years of eternity,” as is the title chosen for the volume of proceedings published in 2015—50 ans d’éternité. Jubilé de la Mission archéologique fran- çaise de Saqqâra (1963–2013).6 Fifty years of work are here tagged as partaking in the ancient Egyptian project of eternalization and at the same time, bolster too readily the “reactionary utopia” of eternal Egypt. At the same time, the French example points to the blatant uneasiness that a site like the Hyksos capital of Avaris created for its academic and public recipients; a site whose 50 year jubilee could not have been labeled as “50 years of eternity”: with no clear-cut Egyptian culture, no monumental architecture evoking eternalization, no devotion to the funerary realm.7 It is a site that has challenged the modern historiography of ancient Egypt precisely because it opposed the reproduction of preconceived narratives. In what follows I will look at how knowledge about the Hyksos has been represented and circulated; for the sake of demonstration, I will confine myself to a select number of recent academic textbooks for a wider audience and examples of a more public dissemination. In his new history of ancient Egypt published in 2011, Van De Mieroop, by training not a historian of Egypt but of Mesopotamia, states that

2 Carruthers, “Introduction: Thinking about Histories of Egyptology,” 8. 3 Carruthers, “Introduction: Thinking about Histories of Egyptology,” 9. 4 Moreno García, “The Cursed Discipline?,” 53. 5 Langer, “The Informal Colonialism of Egyptology.” 6 Legros, 50 ans d’éternité. 7 For a recent assessment of some of its cultural features, see Bader, “Cultural Mixing in Egyp- tian Archaeology.”

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Sir Isaac Newton’s 18th-century depiction of the Hyksos as cannibals is typical for the view that dominated until recently. Opinions on the Second Intermediate Period have changed in the last few decades, and today more scholars believe that the Hyksos made up part of a political aned cultural complexity in which both Egyptians and foreigners played important parts.8

Similarly, another Near Eastern historian, Kuhrt, clearly distinguished in her 1995 history of the ancient Near East between a situation of historical co- existence and accommodation and the triumphalist later “rhetoric that reviled the rule of the Hyksos as irreligious and destructive.”9 An early example of such a balanced reassessment of the Hyksos is Kemp’s treatment.10 Another is Grimal in his 1988 Histoire de l’Egypte Ancienne. While he still makes reference to nationalist agendas in his chapter title (“The inva- sion”) and some of his terminology (the “liberation” of Egypt in Ahmose’s 25th year reign11), he describes the Hyksos’ seizure of power as a gradual, and widely accepted process:

The final stage of the Hyksos rise to power may have been violent, but their gradual infiltration seems to have been much more widely accepted by the Egyptian population at the time than the later nationalistic texts of the New Kingdom suggest (…) The Hyksos Kings themselves were great builders and artisans, leaving behind them temples, statues, reliefs and scarabs, and even encouraging the continued dissemination of Egyptian literature.12

He credits the Hyksos with achieving a successful balance between their own indigenous and Egyptian culture, showing respect fort the host culture and instituting a successful method of government that consisted of an immer- sion in the existing political system.13 Grimal also emphasized that the Hyksos

8 Van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt, 126 f. 9 Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East c. 3000–330 BCE, 173. 10 Kemp, “Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period.” 11 Grimal, Histoire de l’Egypte ancienne, 226, 240; Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, 182, 195. See also Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 41, who questions whether the Theban war would have been regarded as a “liberation” by the Egyptians. 12 Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, 186 (for the original French version: Grimal, Histoire de l’Egypte ancienne, 230). 13 Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, 186 (for the original French version: Grimal, Histoire de l’Egypte ancienne, 231).

Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 73–86 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:12:04AM via free access 76 Schneider presence in Egypt was evidently less damaging than portrayed later, and that the Hyksos left a legacy not only in the technological field, particularly warfare innovation, but also in religion, culture, and philosophy from which the New Kingdom pharaohs would draw inspiration.14 Similarly balanced presentations of the evidence can be found in Bourriau’s chapter for the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt,15 or Stiebing’s textbook, Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture. Bard’s work, Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, provides a sober and objective account of the complex, hybrid material evidence and also speaks explicitly about the inherently biased Egyptian perspective.16 Within the German book market, Bommas’ introduction to ancient Egypt is a similar call for revision of one-sided earlier views.17 While these well-informed, multi-faceted assessments have certainly become more regular in recent years, it is striking to notice that very different treatments have not diminished much. This is in spite of the fact that Tell el-Dabʿa has become one of the best-published sites of Egypt, and that over- views of the state of knowledge (e.g., the catalogue Pharaonen und Fremde; Bietak’s volume Avaris. The Capital of the Hyksos) have always been easily accessible. The continuous existence of treatments of the Hyksos Period where it is denied historical relevance, or that it should be seen in negative terms, is indicative of the prevalence of alternative concepts and agendas. Assmann’s Ägypten: Eine Sinngeschichte proposes an “approach that is distinct from both cultural history and the historiography of events. It sets out to explore a third dimension: the history of Egypt as a chapter in the history of meaning,” and looks more specifically at “fabrications, with which the Egyptians organized their memories and experiences.”18 While the book’s second chapter of 35 pages is devoted to the First Intermediate Period and propels the view that the period’s chaos lived on in literary fabrications that remained “alive and memorially operative,”19 and while the book’s fifth chapter of 80 pages deals with religious, political and cultural core structures of the

14 Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt, 186 f. (for the original French version: Grimal, Histoire de l’Egypte ancienne, 231 f.). 15 Bourriau, “The Second Intermediate Period.” 16 Bard, An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, 195–99; 2nd edition, 211–16. 17 Bommas, Das Alte Ägypten, 70–77. 18 Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 8 (German: Assmann, Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, 19). 19 Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 79–114 (German: Assmann, Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, 97–31). For a critical assessment, Schneider, “What is the Past but a Once Material Exist- ence Now Silenced?”.

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Third Intermediate Period,20 the Hyksos do not occupy a place in Assmann’s history of meaning. The Hyksos Period shows up exclusively as part of the historical introduction to the New Kingdom, and only as part of the political symbolism of expulsion and liberation produced by the Theban kings.21 The 21st Dynasty and the Libyan Period, while exhibiting markers of Libyan culture as much as the Hyksos Period exhibited markers of Hyksos culture, are instead reconstructed by Assmann around important texts from the time period, the Tales of Woe and of Wenamun, Oracular Decrees, the Chronicle of Prince Osorkon and the Piankhy stele. It is true that Assmann acknowledges the existence of archaeological traces as one component of our knowledge of the past, besides textual messages and cultural memories, and he accepts that the Hyksos Period had a significant impact on Egypt’s memory. However, he privileges textual sources over material ones, and discards the rich scholarship on cultural memory and material evidence. The complex and diverse situation of the material evidence without extensive literary texts lending themselves to a proper intellectual history appears to have been conducive to excluding the Hyksos Period from Assmann’s history of meaning. Moreover, Assmann subscribes to a negative narrative of this period when proclaiming that “the New Kingdom begins with the wars of liberation against the Hyksos, whose seizure of power in Egypt marked the end of the Middle Kingdom and its inglorious aftermath.”22 It would have been important not to neglect that history of meaning and to contrast it with, or invalidate, its modern appropriations, to mention only Helck’s portrayal of Hurrian Hyksos (with a former Indian or Indo-Aryan elite) as the architects of Egypt’s militarist grandeur.23 This is particularly regrettable because of the meaningfulness and historical impact ascribed to the Hyksos in all modern scholarship, as catalysts of the purportedly more open-minded, expansive or progressive mindset of the New Kingdom (Hayes in 195924)—a view that itself seems too simplistic, imposing a modernist agenda on a complex evolutionary history of hundreds of years. An example of this assessment is Alan Lloyd’s:

20 Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 285–364 (German: Assmann, Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, 319–403). 21 Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 197–99 (German: Assmann, Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, 225–27). 22 Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 197 (German: Assmann, Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, 225). 23 Helck, Die Beziehungen Ägyptens zu Vorderasien, 102 f. 24 Hayes, The Scepter of Egypt II, 3 f. This assessment has remained the same also in the 4th, revised printing of 1990.

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The Hyksos were consistently given a bad press by the Ancient Egyptians, who present them as barbarians with no sympathy whatsoever for Egyptian culture. This image is demonstrably wide of [sic] the mark on both counts. Indeed, the Hyksos Period is probably one of the most influential in Egyptian history: in the first place, it seems to have badly shaken Egyptian feelings of self-sufficiency and security; secondly, Egypt acquired many cultural and technological benefits; and, thirdly the country was given the military capability and the motivation to cre- ate an Asiatic Empire, the most important new departure of the New Kingdom. Be that as it may, the Theban rulers associated with Manetho’s Seventeenth Dynasty had no intention of tolerating a Hyksos presence in Egypt any longer than they had to and slowly built up sufficient strength against the foreigners that eventually confined them to their old base in the Eastern Delta.25

None of the assertions made here can currently be ascertained—if the “Egyptian” feelings of security were shaken up around 1650 BCE is anything but certain; quite the opposite, the Hyksos established secure governance after the demise of the 13th Dynasty. It is equally not clear whether the Hyksos themselves can be credited for the cultural and technological innovation that has been ascribed to them or whether the contexts of such innovation in the Middle Bronze Age were more varied. This also applies to the military capability and motivation; as a matter of fact, the empire building started with a delay of two generations and seeing a direct nexus may be as much a historical fal- lacy as it would be to link the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, two generations earlier. Lastly, Lloyd continues to employ the term “foreigners,” a fraught term that does not reflect evidence or modern scholarship. A second, still widely represented portrayal of the Hyksos sees them as violent invaders, in line with the account given by Manetho, narratives of the victorious 18th Dynasty and 19th Dynasty texts, but even more so modern narratives from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Grimal paid tribute to this approach in his title and terminology, if not his main narrative.26 Often the

25 Lloyd, Ancient Egypt: State and Society, 13 f. His view is almost identical to the assessment by Hayes (partially even literally identical, cf. Hayes The Scepter of Egypt II, 4: “They [the Hyksos] rid them [the Egyptians] once and for all of the old feeling of self-sufficiency and false security”). Cf. also Brewer and Teeter, Egypt and the Egyptians, 40 (2nd edition, 46). 26 Grimal, Histoire de l’Egypte ancienne, 226 and A History of Ancient Egypt, 182.

Journal of EgyptianDownloaded History from 11 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2018) 73–86 04:12:04AM via free access Hyksos Research in Egyptology and Egypt’s Public Imagination 79 material evidence suggesting peaceful immigration and the Manethonian and earlier modern claim of a violent conquest are combined, while also endowing the invaders with special dynamism and, despite their “unquestionable bar- barities” (Breasted27), crediting them with having a transformative effect on New Kingdom history and society, which owed them “an incalculable debt.”28 In Tignor’s book Egypt. A Short History, the Princeton historian defends a view that is not only unaware of Tell el-Dabʿa scholarship, but in its assessment of the Hyksos’ attitude to Egyptian culture, discards also pre-Tell el-Dabʿa scholarship (e.g. that of Breasted) that saw the Hyksos as undergoing processes of acculturation.29 In his view, after an initial immigration of Semitic speakers to Egypt, “eventually Hyksos military forces, assembled outside the country, overthrew Egypt’s local rulers and established their own monarchy.”30 He opposes the Hyksos to other conquerors of Egypt who assimilated to the host culture, or at the very least displayed “their admiration of the country and its talented people”:

Not so the Hyksos. As the campaigns carried out by Ahmose and his suc- cessor, Thutmose I, make clear, the Asian Hyksos peoples did not win the favor of the local people or embrace Egyptian mores. The Egyptians regarded them as foreign oppressors and exulted in their defeat. Thus, by the time that the New Kingdom emerged, the Egyptians had reestablished their identity distinct from that of their conquerors and enunciated a set of practices and beliefs decidedly different from the nomadic and invad- ing Hyksos, whom the new dynasts slew or drove from the country.31

Tignor, adopting here an idea recurrent since the 19th century, complements this portrayal by crediting the Hyksos with the introduction to Egypt, as their most impressive and indelible contribution to Egyptian culture, of the horse-drawn chariot that “their warriors used to rout Egyptian infantry-based militias,” a new technology allegedly

sweeping through all of Europe, Asia and North Africa at this time (…), sending waves of shock and awe through those armies that had not

27 Breasted, A History of Egypt, 221. 28 Breasted, A History of Egypt, 221. 29 Breasted, A History of Egypt, 222. Also Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 320 f. (§307). 30 Tignor, Egypt. A Short History, 58. 31 Tignor, Egypt. A Short History, 59.

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encountered armed charioteers before … Egyptian army units were no match for the Hyksos war charioteers, who also possessed other superior weapons, such as javelins and spears that charioteers also hurled from their speeding chariots. In addition Hyksos infantry soldiers wielded bows and arrows and protected themselves by wearing bronze and leather armor. Even more frightening was the heavy, crushing falchion, a single-edged sword.32

This broad-brush sketch combines the Manethonian account with specula- tion about Hyksos warfare that is not currently supported by evidence; quite to the contrary, we have to assume that naval warfare was the backbone of the Hyksos military until the Theban reconquest, as Spalinger has re-emphasized.33 In its amalgamation of incompatible concepts—nomadism and large chariotry forces—Tignor’s sketch is methodologically flawed and anachronistic.34 Wilkinson, in his book The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt that adheres to a pattern of development and decadence, describes the First and the Second Intermediate Periods as “dark ages of chaos that saw Egypt tested to the break- ing point in harsh lessons incurred by a weak hereditary monarchy, climate change and unchecked immigration.”35 In his chapter on the Hyksos Period, titled “Bitter Harvest,” Wilkinson sketches the image of a “great tide of human migration pouring into the Nile delta” as a result of the breakdown of border surveillance at the end of the 12th Dynasty, immigrants he identifies as com- ing from Byblos (like the individual owning the statue with the mushroom shaped coiffure), Cyprus, and Bedouin tribespeople from Southern Palestine.36 Substituting nationalist justifications for demise to historiographical explanation, Wilkinson states about the 13th Dynasty:

Weakened by disease, the whole of Lower Egypt became easy prey to an outside aggressor. From over the border, a force of well-equipped invaders, armed with the latest military technology—horse-drawn

32 Tignor, Egypt. A Short History, 58. 33 Spalinger, War in Ancient Egypt, 19, 22 f. 34 Cf. Spalinger, War in Ancient Egypt, 22f.: “Thus the traditional interpretation of Hyksos, horses, and chariotry has to be revised in light of these facts … [T]here was no lighten- ing descent of a hoard of semi-nomadic horse warriors upon the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.” 35 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 117 (paperback edition, 101). 36 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 184 (paperback edition, 163 f.).

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chariots—stormed Egypt, taking beleaguered Hutwaret and sweeping on southward to conquer the ancient Memphis. The Hyksos had arrived.37

While earlier Avaris, settled by immigrants, had been “a multicultural town, unlike anywhere else in Egypt,”38 the Hyksos (purportedly) transformed it into a town “wholly Asiatic in culture, worshipped a foreign god (Baal), and were buried following foreign rites.”39 Benefitting from unparalleled prosperity, the Hyksos rulers spread “Asiatic culture across the eastern delta” and “gave full expression to their distinctive cultural identity.”40 In this presentation the abundant evidence to the contrary, a very visible accommodation of the traditions of Egyptian culture and kingship, demonstrated so unequivocally in modern scholarship, is entirely absent; rather, Wilkinson accentuates a nationalist dichotomy: When “Egypt (was) threatened and occupied by foreign powers to the north and the south, (and) the very existence of an independent Egypt, ruled by Egyptians, looked precarious,”41 the Thebans finally fought back and established “the power and the glory” (as is the chapter title for the New Kingdom42). In the same vein are other recent presentations in German and French. Schlögl’s history of ancient Egypt sees the nature of the Hyksos reflected in the fact that they made “the violent Seth” their main god—a confusion of the Egyptian Seth with the Levantine Seth-Baal—;43 he subscribes to the idea that horse and chariot gave them military superiority over the Egyptians, and endorses a historical narrative that is aptly summarized in his chapter sub- titles “Kings and queens fight for freedom,” “Fight against the Asiatic invaders,” “Fight for freedom,” and “Liberation.”44 The same rhetoric is characteristic of Della Monica’s portrayal of the history of Egypt in the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period, which carries the telling title L’Egypte des temps difficiles: Des ténèbres à la lumière. In the chapter titles, the time stretching from the 13th to the 17th Dynasties is here encapsulated in the terms “l’obscurité” and “l’Egypte des ténèbres,” whereas “les ténèbres se déchirent, le jour se lève” only with the liberation wars of the Theban kings. A presentation exclusively showcasing this approach for a wider audience is a recent National Geographic

37 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 188 (paperback edition, 167). 38 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 184 (paperback edition, 164). 39 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 188 (paperback edition, 167 f.). 40 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 191 (paperback edition, 170 f.). 41 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 198 (paperback edition, 177 f.). 42 Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 199 (paperback edition, 179). 43 Schlögl, Das alte Ägypten, 177. 44 Schlögl, Das alte Ägypten, 178 ff.

Journal of Egyptian History 11 (2018) 73–86 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:12:04AM via free access 82 Schneider article on the Theban queens as “freedom fighters” against the Hyksos invaders (Cordón45). Agut and Moreno Garcia have recently not only given a balanced historiographical view of the Hyksos Period but also commented on the adoption of the negative Theban/Manethonian discourse in much modern scholarship; a discourse that may have been reused by the Saite kings in their political fight against Babylonian and Persian overlordship.46 This stereotypical portrayal of the Hyksos as aggressors is also prevalent in fictional treatments of the period. Most well-known in this respect is the rep- resentation by Jacq, a trained Egyptologist turned novelist, who has devoted a trilogy of novels to the fight of Queen Ahhotep against the barbaric rule of the Hyksos, under the title La Reine Liberté. The first volume introducing the Hyksos rule is accordingly labeled L’Empire des ténèbres, enabling a successful dramatic, if not historical framework for the plot. Similar in its portrayal of the Hyksos as oppressors and the Theban Kings as freedom fighters is Smith’s novel Desert God47 and Gedge’s “Lords of the Two Lands” trilogy, in which the Hyksos are referred to as Setiu. This template figures also in pre-Tell el-Dabʿa novels on the Hyksos such as Norton’s Shadow Hawk. It is striking to observe how similar the concepts and terminologies are in what pretends to be academic presentations of the Hyksos rule (such as Wilkinson and Della Monica’s) and what is historical or historicizing fiction. In her recent contribution to the volume Histories of Egyptology, Interdisciplinary measures, Moser has pointed to examples of knowledge exchange between for- mal and popular treatments of historical topics, and the impact that popular treatments have had on the academic discourse.48 Here, both trajectories may independently recreate traditions about the Second Intermediate Period from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, although Della Monica’s title (l’Egypte des ténèbres) resonates with Jacq’s (L’Empire des ténèbres). An example of an influential academic view is Wilson’s portrayal of Hyksos occupation in The Burden of Egypt, published six years after the end of the Second World War; here, an “arrogant invader” inflicted upon Egypt “the Great Humiliation.”49

45 Cordón, “Three of a Kind. The Rebel Queens of Thebes.” 46 Agut and Moreno García, L’Égypte des Pharaons, 297 ff. 47 The unscholarly nature becomes already evident by the fact that the Pharaoh (Tamose) carries an unattested name in which the element “Ka” of the historical precursor “Kamose” has been made into an unintelligible “Ta” (which could at most be the feminine article!). 48 Moser, “Legacies of Engagement.” 49 Wilson, The Burden of Egypt, 154 (the title of the chapter about the Hyksos Period); “arrogant invader,” p. 165.

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What is pertinent to our assessment is the observation that there still coex- ist opposite academic narratives. An explanation of why this is the case may be provided by the opposition that research on Tell el-Dabʿa has created to con- ventional Egyptology. In his aforementioned contribution on Egyptology as a “cursed discipline,” Moreno Garcia has given a lucid diagnosis of contemporary Egyptology.50 He demonstrates that, unlike Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology continues to be more interested in spectacular finds than historical or soci- ological understanding. Most often it pursues the “reactionary utopia” of an “eternal Egypt,” an elitist agenda focused on pharaohs and the spiritual rather than society and the materialist, and prioritizing the description of objects over historiographical analysis and the interpretation of change. This diagnosis allows us to identify the conflicting assessments of the Hyksos as emerging from the two parties in a disciplinary conflict: The site of Tell el-Dabʿa does not suit the elitist agenda of traditional Egyptology; it lies within Egypt but outside the traditional parameters of the field. As a site of hybrid culture in Egypt, Tell el-Dabʿa implements in Egyptology the methods of Near Eastern Archaeology—what we observe is “cultural mixing in Egyptian Archaeology” (to use the title of Bader51) in the sense of mixing disciplinary cultures. From this perspective, the portrayal of the Hyksos as “aggressors” or “invaders” could be read as a critique of Hyksos research as “aggressive” against or “invasive” to an entrenched disciplinary view within Egyptology. By virtue of its evidence, Tell el-Dabʿa research also privileges a materialist approach over textual ones and promotes an analysis that from the outset needs to look beyond Egypt, and at Egypt from beyond, in contrast to many long-cherished approaches. Therefore—and this is probably the single most significant contribution that Tell el-Dabʿa has made to Egyptology—it implants in Egyptology the provocative seed to imagine a different Egypt, and a different discipline.

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50 Moreno García, “The Cursed Discipline?”. 51 Bader, “Cultural Mixing in Egyptian Archaeology.”

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Popular Fiction Cited

Gedge, P. Lords of the Two Lands: Vol. 1, The Hippopotamus Marsh (1998); Vol. 2, The Oasis (1999); Vol. 3, The Horus Road (2000).

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