Page 165 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

13^ The Chariots [1720—1650 b.c.]
who now formed a sort of government in exile at the court of
pharaoh at Thebes.
But time passed, and the counterstroke never came. The
Hyksos king who had commanded the original conquering host
had been dead these many years, and his successor, too. The new
king—and his successor, too, for he reigned only a few years—
began to make some attempt to bridge the gulf between the
Egyptians and their conquerors, and to introduce a modicum of
Egyptian culture into their courts. To their good Semitic names
of Yakob-bael and Yakob-hat they added, in the manner of the
pharaohs, an Egyptian throne-name. They and their nobles
sealed their letters with scarab seals, just as though they were
real Egyptians, and did not care that the “inscriptions” cut on
the seals by their own jewelers were meaningless scrawls with
only a superficial resemblance to the hieroglyphic script which
they had never bothered to learn.
They were more successful with a piece of religious propa­
ganda, when they officially identified their own chief god Sutek
with the Egyptian god Set. Set had been worshipped in the delta,
and particularly in the Avaris district, for as long as records went
back. With the rise of the Theban kings in the south, however,
the worship of Set had fallen into disrepute. For the Theban mon­
archs were worshippers and earthly incarnations of the hawk­
god Horus, and Horus and Set were the two protagonists in a
popular cycle of legends which were well known to refer to a
struggle between upper and lower Egypt at the beginning of time,
when the gods walked the earth in their true shape. And with the
Horus kings on the throne of Thebes Set had been recast as
the villain of the whole Osiris and Isis legend, an embodiment
of all evil. But his worship had survived in the delta, and it was
an astute move on the part of the Hyksos monarchs to pose as
the champions of the age-old delta god against Horus and the
Horus-kings of upper Egypt. And the propaganda did indeed
succeed in persuading a number of the younger men of the con­
quered people to identify their loyalty with the alien govern­
ment of the north and to regard the southerners as heretics
attempting to impose a false theology upon the delta.
But the men who had lived through the conquest and fought