Benson, Margaret; Gourlay, Janet: The temple of Mut in Asher: an account of the excavation of the temple and of the religious representations and objects found therein, as illustrating the history of Egypt and the main religious ideas of the Egyptians (London, 1899)

148

THE TEMPLE OF MUT.

[part iv.

The story of the Hebrew slave and governor
Joseph cannot be assigned to any particular time,
but there is no evidence to contradict the tradition
that it was to a Hyksos Pharaoh he owed his sudden
advancement from prison to the vizier's chariot.
Such a king indeed might have welcomed a servant
who came from a land and people akin to his own,
and whose religion was of a type perhaps more
familiar to his hereditary faith than that of his new
subjects.

The latter part of the Hyksos dominion was
again filled with struggle and revolt, while success
-swayed now to this side and now to that. The
princes of the royal Theban house had been
driven far to the south, and there had mingled
Bc- their line with a Berber race. They now gradu-

c. 1610- , .

^597- ally worked their way north, even reaching Thebes,
until the prince Seqenen-ra felt himself able to
again assume the title of king. His reign, if we
may call it such, and those of two of his sons,
were occupied by perpetual efforts to shake off
the foreign tyranny. Finally victory rested with
the Egyptians, when his third son Aahmes suc-
ceeded to the leadership. This was a man strong
enough to draw all the resisting power of the
country to follow him, and under him the fierce
b.c. united effort to break the hated yoke ended in the
expulsion of the foreigner from the land he had
trodden down for five hundred years.