HYKSOS. — By this term (Yakāc) Manetho designates the leaders of Asian tribes who invaded Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom, settling in the Delta, where, establishing the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Dynasties, they ruled from approximately 1730 to 1580 B.C.
According to Manetho as well (in Flavius Josephus, C. Apionem, I, 14), H. was to be interpreted etymologically as “shepherd kings.” But the official designation in contemporary Egyptian documents is hāʾah-ʾāʾat, that is, “chiefs of foreign lands”: a periphrasis that does not imply any specific ethnic community. The term was subsequently extended to denote all the participants in the invasion. The scarcity of monuments from the period of the H. and the vague later references to them make historical reconstruction highly uncertain. The certain elements are: a) the H. constituted an association of tribes, mostly Semitic, which came to Egypt from Asia; b) they founded a capital in the eastern Delta called Avaris, which according to some Egyptologists (Montet, Gardiner) Tanis (v.); c) they adopted the pharaonic royal titulary for their rulers; d) they displayed a predilection for the Egyptian god Seth, in whom they perhaps saw a hypostasis of the Semitic Baʿal. The introduction of the horse and chariot into Egypt, traditionally attributed to the H., cannot be demonstrated, nor can it be excluded a priori. The chronology (reconstructed partly on the basis of the so-called “stela of year 400,” and partly from the fragments of the “Turin King List”) remains highly uncertain, as does the number and succession of the individual H. rulers, especially those of the Sixteenth Dynasty.
Some ancient authors, such as Apion and Flavius Josephus, identified the H. with the Hebrews, but this hypothesis is untenable: the peaceful arrival in Egypt of Jacob’s family cannot be identified with the invasion of the H. If the year 1730 is accepted as the date of the invasion, Jacob’s descent, placed in the seventeenth century by the recent chronology of A. Ungnad and W. F. Albright, would coincide with the period of the H.