The Hyksos in Egypt
When Joseph was raised to be second over Egypt, the Pharaoh who exalted him was unnamed. The Bible does not say which dynasty ruled, only that the king clothed Joseph in fine linen and put a gold chain about his neck…
Biblical Narrative
When Joseph was raised to be second over Egypt, the Pharaoh who exalted him was unnamed. The Bible does not say which dynasty ruled, only that the king clothed Joseph in fine linen and put a gold chain about his neck and made him ride in his second chariot. The phrase is striking: in the world the Bible elsewhere assumes, chariots belong to Egyptian Pharaohs and to Canaanite kings of the lowlands, but they were unknown in the Egypt of the early Middle Kingdom. The chariot is Hyksos technology, introduced into Egypt by West Semitic invaders.
When Genesis 47 has Pharaoh giving Joseph's family the land of Goshen — the eastern Delta — and welcoming his brothers as 'rulers over my cattle', the welcome is intelligible if the king on the throne is himself a West Semite. A native Egyptian Pharaoh might have been suspicious of Asiatic immigrants; a Hyksos king of Avaris would have been their kinsman. The Joseph who rises from prison to vizier may stand in a longer line of Asiatic dignitaries who, in the Hyksos centuries, did exactly that.
And when Exodus opens with the words 'there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph,' that line carries its full historical weight only against the Hyksos backdrop. The expulsion of the Asiatic kings under Ahmose I in roughly 1550 BCE was a national liberation in Egyptian memory; it inaugurated the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom. Asiatic Semites who had prospered under the Hyksos found themselves, almost overnight, the pariahs of a vengeful native restoration. The biblical setup of an enslaving Pharaoh who 'knew not Joseph' has, in this reading, an exact historical correlate.
None of this proves the Bible's history, and the patriarchs are not named in any Hyksos source. But the Hyksos century gives the Joseph-and-Exodus material an explanatory frame that no other period of Egyptian history can. It places Asiatic Semites in the Delta, in positions of power, in the centuries the Bible describes; it accounts for the chariots and the foreign-appointed viziers; and it ends with a violent native expulsion that translates seamlessly into a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph.
And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives... Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.Exodus 1:8, 15
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Hyksos were a West Semitic-speaking ruling class who controlled Lower Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1650-1550 BCE), constituting Manetho's Fifteenth Dynasty. Their capital was at Avaris in the eastern Nile Delta, identified since 1966 with Tell el-Dab'a. Excavations under Manfred Bietak and the Austrian Archaeological Institute have established a continuous stratigraphy from Middle Kingdom Asiatic settlement (c. 1900 BCE), through the consolidation of Hyksos rule (c. 1700 BCE), to the Theban conquest under Ahmose I (c. 1550 BCE).
The material culture of Avaris is unmistakably West Semitic in origin and Egyptianizing in elaboration. Houses are built on the four-room plan attested across the contemporary Levant. Tombs contain donkey burials, characteristic Levantine bronze daggers, and Tell el-Yahudiyeh juglets (a small black piriform vessel manufactured across the eastern Mediterranean). Yet the kings adopted Egyptian throne-names, used hieroglyphs for their inscriptions, and worshipped a syncretic Seth-Baal who combined the Egyptian god of foreigners with the Levantine storm-god.
The Hyksos brought to Egypt — or popularized within Egypt — a suite of innovations whose long-term impact on Egyptian civilization was profound: the horse-drawn light chariot (with spoked wheels, replacing solid-disc carts), the composite recurve bow, the curved khopesh sword, vertical looms for textile production, lyre and lute, certain crops, and humpbacked Zebu cattle. The conventional Egyptian narrative was that these were imposed by foreign domination; revisionist scholarship since the 1990s has emphasized continuous trade and migration as the channel of transmission rather than conquest.
The Hyksos expulsion is documented in the autobiography of Ahmose son of Ibana, a marine inscribed on his tomb at El-Kab, and in the partly-preserved Karnak stelae of Kamose. The siege and capture of Avaris is described as a hard-fought campaign, followed by a pursuit of the Hyksos remnant to the Levantine fortress of Sharuhen, which fell after a three-year siege. The Egyptian victors then mounted reprisal raids into the southern Levant — the first sustained Egyptian military presence in Canaan, which would crystallize a century later into the New Kingdom imperial province.
The Hyksos period is no longer to be understood as an interlude of foreign domination but as a chapter in the longue durée of Levantine-Egyptian interconnection that runs from the Old Kingdom to the Persian conquest.Manfred Bietak, Avaris and Piramesse (1979, with subsequent revisions)