Page 216 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

There were men in the crowd who still counted themselves

northerners, because their great-grandfathers had escaped to the
free south during and after the occupation, and who still laid

claim to lost estates in the deltalands, although their families had

now lived for three generations in the narrow river valley of the
south. There were other more recent arrivals too, families who

had lived under the occupation in the north but who during the
recent fighting had thrown in their lot with the liberation forces

so openly that they had been forced to flee, aided by the under­

ground movement, to the liberated lands of the south.
But the southerners were quick to remind these embittered

refugees that upper Egypt, too, had had its time of oppression;
that it had not lasted so long as the martyrdom of lower Egypt

was solely due to the devoted resistance of the southern armies in

the years following the fall of the north. For a hundred years
southern Egypt had retained its independence, until, forty years

or so ago, Klian, the powerful king of the north, had organized an

immense army in his garrison city of Avaris and in one irresistible
campaign had overcome the desperate resistance of the kings of

Thebes.
All but the youngest of those who formed the crowd around

the temple had grown up during the thirty years of oppression

that had followed, when a black-bearded Canaanite governor
had sat in the royal palace at Thebes, and regiments of foreign-

tongued troops had garrisoned every town. The earls of all the
nomes into which the land was divided had fled to the Sudan

with the royal family, or had been executed, and their estates

had been granted to northerners or Palestinians from the Hyksos
nobility. Much of the temple lands of Amon had been confiscated

and granted to the new temples of the Hyksos god Sutek, and

many thought that the victory of the powers of darkness was
thereby made absolute. For Sutek was said to be but another

name for the old god Set, the archenemy of the hawk-god Horus
who from ancient times had been the special protector of upper