The Rulers Of Foreign Lands

Was a new regional power, once thought of as a bloodthirsty invading force, actually a catalyst for ancient Egypt’s most prosperous era?

- Andrew Curry

Egypt’s carefully recorded lists of rulers run pharaoh after pharaoh for almost 3,000 years. Except, that is, for a century or so around 1640 B.C. when a new group came to dominate the kingdom on the Nile, throwing the region into turmoil and ushering in a new era in Egyptian history.

“For what cause I know not, a blast of the gods smote us; and unexpectedly, from the regions of the East, invaders of obscure race marched in confidence of victory against our land,” writes Manetho, a priest and the author of a history of Egypt called Aegyptiaca likely written in the third century B.C. Despite the fact that he is describing events at a remove of almost 1,500 years, and although his writings survive only because they are quoted in even later works, such as the first century A.D. author Josephus’ “Against Apion,” the account is no less evocative. “By main force, they easily overpowered the rulers of the land; they then burned our cities ruthlessly, razed to the ground the temples of gods, and treated all the natives with a cruel hostility, massacring some and leading into slavery the wives and children of others, and appointing as king one of their number.”

When it came to the story of the rise and short-lived rule of these “invaders of obscure race,” for centuries scholars took for granted Manetho’s account of invasion and disruption as reproduced by Josephus. The tale was supported by other historical accounts, from tables of dynasties, rulers, and reigns found in Egyptian temples to papyrus lists of Egypt’s dynasties. Egyptologists tended to treat the period as a ripple in an otherwise unbroken stream that soon smoothed and vanished, a curious footnote in the three-millennia-long sweep of Egyptian history.