HYKSOS
According to the conventional reconstruction of Egyptian history, the Hyksos were the dominant group in Egypt, constituting the 15th and 16th dynasties, on a date that varies with the authors (1650-1542, Great Rialp Encyclopedia).
The term Hyksos comes from Manetus, and its translation from Egyptian is “sovereigns of foreign countries” (“hk,. w,sw.t” = Hekayesut).
It is generally accepted that Jacob and his sons settled in Egypt during the Hyksos rule. However, the conventional chronology of Egypt is subject to major problems, one of which has been the identification of the Hyksos.
Authors such as Velikovsky and Courville have come to identify the Hyksos with the Amalekites, after a careful analysis of literary, historical and monumental sources. There are several elements that allow us to reach this identification:
(a) On the one hand there is the record of Manetus, an Egyptian priest, who states that the Hyksos, “an ignoble race from the east,” conquered Egypt without any difficulty, without even having fought a battle. (Quoted in Josephus, Against Apion 1:14.)
This can be understood within the framework of the Israelite exodus. At Rephidim, the Israelites were attacked by Amalek, remaining victorious only thanks to divine intervention through the intercession of Moses (Ex. 17:8-16).
(b) There is a whole set of traditions spread throughout Arabia on the subject of the conquest of Egypt by the Amalekites, as a result of a migration they undertook, driven by a cataclysm of great magnitude, towards Egypt.
Thus, authors of the early Middle Ages, such as Al-Shamhudi, Masudi, Albufeda, and others, recount this migration of the Amalekites and, also, the “military walk” in which Egypt fell into the hands of the Amalekites like a ripe fruit. .
(c) Hatsepsut, queen of a dynasty later than that of the Hyksos, left an inscription referring to her works of rebuilding the land plundered by the rapacious domination of the Hyksos. She gives them the suggestive name “amu”, stating that their capital was Hauar (Auaris), and that they had not worshiped the god Ra. This identifies the Amu with the Hyksos. Based on the revised chronology, Hatsepsut was a contemporary of Solomon.
(d) Names such as Apop I, Apop II have been found in official seals of the Hyksos dynasties. It was Apop I who, a few decades after the Amu invasion, founded the city of Thebes. In Greek tradition, there was a king in Egypt named Ogyges who was the founder of Thebes.
Now, Apop is a provisional transcription by Egyptologists for an inscription whose consonants admit the equivalence “Agog”, which then agrees with the biblical record about the name of the Amalekites kings.
This explains the mention of Agag and Amalek in the exalted terms in which they are found in the book of Numbers, while the people of Israel were in the wilderness: “He will exalt his king more than Agag” (Num. 24:7); “Amalek, head of nations” (Num. 24:20).
According to rabbinic traditions, Amalek set out to conquer the entire world. Seals of the Hyksos kings have been found in Crete, Palestine, Mesopotamia and other places far from Egypt.
Thus, the fame of King Ogyges, founder of Thebes, which had reached the ears of the Greeks, agrees with the name Agag, which is identified with the Apop line of pharaohs. This agrees with the equation Hyksos = Amu = Amalekites.
(e) The destruction of the Amalekites by King Saul, and the death of the last King Agag at the hands of Samuel (1 Sam. 15) marks in the Bible the point of the reappearance of Egypt as a power. Saul’s campaign against the Amalekites was southward, which is consistent with the fact that the hordes of Hyksos who were expelled by the first pharaoh of the Egyptian restoration, Ahmose I, left no historical trace.
Saul put an end to the Amalekite power, although there were still Amalekite groups that dedicated themselves to marauding. An interesting case is that of an Egyptian slave of an Amalekite lord, which agrees with this transitional stage (1 Sam. 30:13 ff.).
The identity of the Hyksos seems to have been definitively revealed with the valuable studies of Velikovsky, Courville and other researchers of ancient sources. The Hyksos-Amalekites entered a defenseless Egypt, without an army or military or political organization, devastated by the ten plagues and by the slaughter at the Red Sea, without Pharaoh or resources of any kind, and easily fell into the hands of the Amalekite nation in your search for new domains.
This conquest took place at the time of the Exodus, around the year 1,441 BC. The liberation of Egypt from the Hyksos-Amalekites took place during the reign of Saul in Israel, and the ascension of Ahmose I to the throne of Egypt as the first pharaoh of the first indigenous dynasty after the Hyksos, the 18th, around the year 1020 BC , was due to Saul’s victorious campaign, which broke the Hyksos yoke that kept Egypt under control.
All records agree on the extreme rapacity of the “shepherd-kings”, the Hyksos pharaohs. Their capital was largely located in Avaris, near present-day el-Arish.