Page 159 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

on their way from the powerful Canaan kingdom to the aid of
their Egyptian ally. For the war between south and north Egypt

had blazed up again, and the king of the south, Subkheferre In-
tef V, was campaigning well within the frontiers of the north.
The hard-pressed king of the north had made an alliance with

the new power of Canaan, and more and more troops from the
east were coming into the country. They were a mixed lot, Ca­
naanites and Amorites and Arabians from the deserts, and they
were led by hawk-nosed arrogant princes who looked with
frankly covetous eyes on the agricultural wealth of the delta. The

Egyptians called them Hiku-khasut, the princes of the desert,
and they did not care much for them. (A later Greek historian
was to write the Egyptian word in Greek as “Hyksos,” and mis­

translate it as “shepherd kings,” a mistranslation which is still cur­
rent today.) There were even Hurrians among them, though
quite how they found themselves subject to the rulers of Canaan
nobody could ever really make out. But when the Hurrian com­

panies passed through, then there was excitement in the village.
For attached to their headquarters there was invariably a
squadron of chariots. And if the horses and chariots excited the

fanatical admiration of the impressionable young men, their
drivers and the spearmen who rode beside them aroused almost
equal admiration among the young ladies of the village. They
were clearly of a different people—and rumor said that they

spoke a different language—from the rest of the Hurrians, and
many of them had red or yellow hair and grey eyes. For months
after they had passed there was a vogue among the young men

of the village for close-trimmed beards and henna-dyed hair!
But already the same year, when the harvest was home, the
majority of the men of the village were summoned for service in
the army. In the cool of an autumn dawn they said good-by to

their wives and young children, assembled with their personal
weapons, bow, spear, and dagger, and marched off along the

levee.
In the barracks outside Memphis they were drilled in battle

tactics and in the use of heavier weapons, lances and maces and
the new cut-and-thrust swords of bronze. Not far away lay the
encampments of the Hyksos allies, and they met them frequent y