Page 223 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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L15SO-151O B.C.]
down at home, and many, after a few months or a year, returned
to the army or joined the merchant ships or the trading cara-
vans.

It was an unsettled period, these years following the libera­
tion. The fanners and artisans were little affected, personally,
by the comprehensive reforms of the administration instituted by
the pharaoh, but that did not in the least prevent them arguing
endlessly about them.

On the whole they were favorably received. Everyone knew
that civil war within Egypt had opened the gates to the Hyksos,
and all were agreed that that must never again happen. It had
been the hereditary nobility of the nomes who, by supporting

rival candidates to the throne from within the royal family, had
turned a family squabble into a civil war. Nor was it unknown,
within the long and chequered history of Egypt, for a strong earl
to overthrow a dynasty and set himself up as pharaoh. Now was
the time to make a clean sweep of the old system of almost
independent earldoms. Much of the old nobility had been wiped

out by the Hyksos, and others, having made a profitable peace
with the occupying power, had now fallen with the fall of that
power, and had been executed or banished. Only nobles of
proved loyalty remained. Amose abolished the hereditary earl­

doms, and decreed that in future the nomes would be governed
by sheriffs appointed by pharaoh and responsible to pharaoh.
The people, hoping for less corruption in the assessment of
tithes and taxes, applauded. But in fact it made less difference

than expected, for the loyal nobility tended to be confirmed as
sheriffs in their own former nomes.
The Hyksos danger was by no means over. Beyond the pres­
ent frontier, well up in Palestine, the new king of the Canaanite

confederacy, Maaibre, still called himself pharaoh of Egypt,
adopted pseudo-Egyptian manners, and inscribed his name on
scarabs with the royal “cartouche.” And there was still a large
minority of Asiatics in the delta, who had immigrated during—
and even before—the Hyksos occupation, but who had been

peaceably settled so long that there was no real pretext for
expelling them. The most numerous of these were the children
of Israel,” as they called themselves, the descendants of some