Near Eastern Historyor palace revolution is that the takeover is accomplished by a
force that is essentially alien to the city or land being taken
over. Takeovers of this sort seem to have occurred with unusual
frequency toward the middle of the second millennium B.C.
The most familiar (though in some ways also the most ob-
scure) of these takeovers may be the so-called Hyksos conquest
of Egypt. The extinction of the Twelfth Dynasty in 1786 B.C.
seems to have led to rival claimants for the Egyptian throne,
and eventually to a fragmentation of the kingdom. Perhaps as
early as ca. 1700 B.C., ambitious Amorite princes from the
Levant began to make themselves lords of small portions of
Lower Egypt. Their "kingdoms" must have been tiny, since
some two hundred men were, or claimed to be, "kings" in the
period between 1786 and ca. 1550 B.C. All of these Asiatic
princes were called hyksos by the Egyptians (the word meant
nothing more than "foreign chiefs," but has become a nation-
ality in some histories). Eventually, however, a heterogeneous
group of Asiatics established a royal house at Avaris, in the
very northeastern corner of the Delta. This regime (Manetho's
Fifteenth Dynasty) had at least pretensions of ruling the entire
land and did extend its dominion over all of Lower Egypt and
into many of the nomes of Upper Egypt. These "Great Hyk-
sos," whose ethnic identity has troubled many investigators
(the names appear to be mostly Amorite, but some seem to be
Hurrian and a very few may be Aryan), were able to maintain
their regime at Avaris for several generations, being finally ex-
pelled by Ahmose of Thebes, founder of the Eighteenth Dy-
nasty, in the eleventh year of his reign at Thebes (probably
1541 B.C.). 14 Although the Great Hyksos tried to assimilate
themselves to the country they ruled and supposed themselves
- The chronological table in CAH n, i: 819, indicates a date
some twenty years earlier. That the accession of Ahmose should be placed in
1552 B.C., and his expulsion of the Great Hyksos in 1541 B.C., is argued
cogently by M. Bietak, "Problems of Middle Bronze Age Chronology: New
Evidence from Egypt," A/A 88 (1984): 471-85.