Page 164 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1720-1650 b.c.] The Princes of the Desert 135

former Egyptian landlords had been killed or enslaved or had
fled to the south. But they had rarely seen these landlords any­
way—they had lived in their town houses just as the present
landlords did, and the agents and overseers who managed the
estates had not, in the majority of cases, been changed. They did
not like their new rulers, but, as life went on and their children
grew up in a world where the Hyksos had always ruled, the first
burning resentment died, and was succeeded by apathy.
But not in every case. There were men in the villages, and
even more in the towns, who consciously kept alive a spirit of
resistance and who, meeting in secret, discussed ways and means
of freeing Egypt from its foreign rulers. They saw their hope in
the south.
The Hyksos had never succeeded in putting into effect their
claim to be the rulers of all Egypt. South of Memphis and the
Fayum, where the cliffs closed in on the valley of the Nile, the
chariots which were by now the major arm of the Hyksos army
could not effectively be deployed. And the rulers of Thebes had
held their own in an almost yearly succession of campaigns.
Fierce battles had taken place between the Semitic troops of the
delta and the Negro companies of Thebes, the tall black spear­
men and bowmen from the Sudan who formed the elite corps of
the army of the south. Nor were the “princes of the desert” al­
ways defeated. Many times the southern armies were forced to
retreat and retreat again, fighting at every ridge or major canal
until the Hyksos, far from their bases and short of supplies, had
to turn back from the unprofitable struggle. And more than once
they captured Thebes itself; but Thebes was less than halfway
to the southern frontier of upper Egypt, and sooner or later the
northern troops gave up the chase, and the south rallied and ex­
pelled the garrison left in Thebes. And the Hyksos were back
where they started.
So the men of the north looked forward to the day when the
south would be strong enough to carry the war the other way.
And not a few of the more resolute of the Egyptians of the delta
packed up their possessions and, traveling by stealth, made their
way south, to join the princes and nobles and landowners of the
north who had fled to Thebes at the time of the conquest, and