Fantastic Metropolis

Whoever the Hyksos were, the following is clear. They began their invasion of the Middle East around 1800 BCE, right around the time that the great Harappan civilization ceased its trade shipments with Mesopotamia, and rolled through to Egypt, which they crushed with pathetic ease. (Remember, all the trappings of war we think of as prototypically Egyptian—chariots, curved blades, recurve bows—these are all Hyksos war technology.) From roughly 1650 to 1500 BCE, the Hyksos ruled in Egypt as Egyptian Kings, sacred to Seth (who changed during the time of Hyksos from a simple storm god to the sinister god of foreigners and deserts he is known as today due to the Hyksos veneration of him… although they hardly ignored the other gods; they couldn’t rule Egypt without them, after all) and their seat of power was at Avaris in the Nile Delta. They introduced new levels of bronzesmithing and pottery craft to the area. They made alliances with the Karmah state in Lower Nubia (which had been under Egyptian rule until the coming of the Hyksos, and took the opportunity to take control of the territory), and while the Hyksos were quick to adopt the ways of the Egyptians and were accepted as such in the Lower Kingdom, the Upper Kingdom was much less tolerant of the “Asiatic dynasty.” (Note: because the Nile flows south to north, what the Egyptians call Lower Egypt is to the north, while Upper Egypt is to the south, nearer to the headwaters of the Nile.) Eventually, Seqenenre Taa, King of Thebes, rose up to re-conquer Lower Egypt. During the reigns of Seqenenre Taa, Kamose and Ahmose, the Hyksos were eventually defeated and Egypt re-united under the Theban dynasty, but the Hyksos did not go easily: Seqenenre Taa died with an axe in his head and his neck stabbed by a Hyksos dagger, and Kamose himself struggled to push the Hyksos out until his death in constant war with the Hyksos monarch Aauserra Apepi. It wasn’t until the reign of Ahmose, after the deaths of both Kamose and Apepi, that the Hyksos were finally beaten and the two kingdoms became one again. And even then, the Ramessid dynasty, which would eventually come to rule Egypt after the misbegotten reigns of Akhenaton and his miserable successor Tutankhamun (not to mention the boy king’s wife Ankhsenamun, her attempt to marry a Hittite prince, and the maneuverings of Ay and Horemheb which ultimately resulted in the ascension of the Ramessids), were from Avaris and worshipped the primary god of Avaris, Seth, the red haired storm god, god of deserts, god of foreigners, war-maker, he who rode in the solar barque with Ra and defeated the serpent Apepi night after night.

And yes, the great Hyksos king and the giant dragon-snake that attempted to eat the sun god at night wore the same name, despite the fact that Apepi was no doubt a very devout worshipper of Seth. Interesting, and let us consider one possible scenario: what if the people of Harappa divided upon the fall of their civilization? What if some of the lost Harappans, possibly accompanied by refugees from the various settlements along the vanished river Saraswati and maybe even folk from Mohenjodaro who wanted to avoid the way, decided to move west? Led by a member of the strange hero-cult, a priest perhaps, they make their way across the trade route to Mesopotamia, harassed along the way by their own people, the people who would become the Medes and Persians (which would explain why the gods and demons of the Vedic stories became reversed in later Persian mythology, if the Persians adopted the techniques of the Harappans but considered their gods to be enemies) and the city-states of the land between the two rivers. The decline of Sumerian civilization takes place at around this time, with new invaders borrowing the Sumerian culture-trappings and becoming known as the Amorites (those who would establish Bab-ilum) around the same time, in 1800 BCE. The foundation of what would become known as Babylon seems almost to happen in a wave of spreading changes that leads from Harappa to Egypt, which points to the idea that the “invasion of the chariot-riders” could be conceived of as an invasion from that direction, rather than the usual descent from some unknown region to the north in the direction of the Caucasus. The invaders from the east also founded what would become known to us as Assyria on the foundation of the Akkadian city of Ashur, meaning that both Sumeria and Akkad passed into the hands of chariot-driving barbarians who strangely knew how to seize, hold and even expand cities quite effectively. Hammurabi of Babylon was king by 1728 BCE, and Shamash-Adad I ruled Assyria from 1749 BCE to 1717 BCE, following which Hammurabi himself became overlord of Assyria as well. This isn’t a lot of time for sophisticated new nations to rise from conquest and culture-assimilation at all, and if we consider a similarity between the Hyksos invasion of Egypt and the chariot-riders nation-building exercises in Mesopotamia, we’re left to wonder how these supposed nomadic invaders could constantly invade the powerful nations of the time, overthrow their cultures and then assimilate them so rapidly.