Page 235 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

19° The Argosies [1580-1510 b.c.]

satisfaction the good people at home received dispatches telling
of the defeat of Sudanese resistance armies, and of the summary
execution of the male population of the revolted cities. Old and
young lined the banks of the Nile to cheer as the returning fleet
sailed by, with the captured chieftains of the rebels hanging head
downward from the rigging, on their way to their well-merited
execution before pharaoh.

The oldest men said that they could not recall having seen
such popular enthusiasm since the day seventy years before
when the army of Amose had marched north in revolt against
the foreign oppressors of Egypt.

What the population of Kush thought is not recorded.

There is not general agreement on the precise dates of the
events of this chapter. The dates given here are those accepted by
C. F. A. Schaeffer in his Stratigraphic Comparee, but some au­

thorities (notably J. A. Wilson in The Burden of Egypt) would
place the events twelve years later. There are in addition a num­
ber of minor points of uncertainty; the .names of the Hyksos
pharaohs at the time of the liberation and during the subsequent

Palestine campaign of Amose are not with certainty those given
here, though these names are recorded for Hyksos leaders living
at approximately this time. It is not absolutely certain that
Thothmes I was a son of Amenhotep I; he may have been a
nephew or other close relative. The decisive battle near Memphis

between Amose and the Hyksos is not historical. But there must
have been a decisive battle, and it is unlikely that it took place
farther into the delta than the old capital.
Particular uncertainty attends the dating of the fall of the
civilization of the Indus valley. Its fall is an undoubted fact, and
the unburied skeletons found lying in the streets and the well

chambers of Mohenfo-daro bear mute witness to its violence and
to the fact that the city was not later reoccupied. It is now
generally believed that the destroyers of the civilization were the
Aryans, and that it is that destruction which is recounted in the

poems of the Rigveda. And these events can hardly have occurred
earlier than 1800 or later than 1500 b.c. A date round about