HYKSOS. - With this term (*Yzóós*), Manetho designates the leaders of Asian tribes who invaded Egypt at the end of the Middle Kingdom, settling in the Delta where, establishing the XVth and XVIth dynasties, they reigned from about 1730 to 1580 B.C.
According to Manetho (as cited by Flavius Josephus, *Contra Apionem*, I, 14), the H. would be etymologically interpretable as “shepherd kings.” However, the official designation in contemporary Egyptian documents is *hq*. *w-h* *szt*, i.e., “rulers of foreign lands”: a periphrasis that does not imply a specific ethnic community. The term then came to be used by extension to denote all the members of the invasion. The scant remains of monuments from the period of the H. and the vague later references to them render historical reconstruction highly uncertain. The certain elements are: a) the H. formed a complex of tribes, mostly Semitic, who came to Egypt from Asia; b) they founded a capital in the eastern Delta called Avaris, which some Egyptologists (Montet, Gardiner) Tanis (v.); c) they adopted the Pharaonic royal protocol for their sovereigns; d) they showed a preference for the Egyptian god Seth, whom they perhaps regarded as an hypostasis of the Semitic Ba’al. The introduction of the horse and chariot into Egypt, traditionally attributed to the H., is not demonstrable, nor can it be ruled out *a priori*. The chronology (partly reconstructed from the so-called “stele of the 400th year” and partly from the fragments of the “papyrus of the kings” of Turin) remains very uncertain, as does the number and succession of individual H. rulers, especially those of the XVIth Dynasty.
Some ancient authors, such as Apion and Flavius Josephus, identified the H. with the Hebrews, but this hypothesis is unsustainable: the peaceful arrival in Egypt of Jacob’s family cannot be equated with the invasion of the H. If one accepts 1730 B.C. as the date of the invasion, Jacob’s descent into Egypt, placed in the 17th century by the recent chronology of A. Ungnad and W. F. Albright, would coincide with the period of the H.
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**Sergio Bosticco**