DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.55202#0171
HYKSOS IMPORTATIONS INTO EGYPT
151
could help, our records of that century leave a great deal to be
desired, as we have already seen. Were it not for later references to
the events of that time, we should scarcely be able to point to a
single event of the period. Civil wars in Egypt and superior arms in
the hands of the foreigners seem to have made the invasion of the
Hyksos all but bloodless until the land was wholly theirs, but it
changed the life of the Nile people more than any event which
happened to them before the days of Alexander and Caesar.
The Egyptian was far from being numerous in the Middle King-
dom. The loss of probably only 60 men by Neb-hepet-Re*’ Montu-
hotpe in the battle which overthrew Heracleopolis shows what a
small nation his was in those days. Without doubt the population
of the land fluctuated a great deal as food was plentiful or scarce,
but in the most prosperous years of the Twelfth Dynasty we can be
certain it never was as large as the numbers who lived on the land
early in the Nineteenth Century a.d., and that we know was scarcely
more than two million persons.2 One must forget the enormous popu-
lation of today and take it that in the Middle Kingdom it was hardly
more than a million at the very outside. Now the swamps are all
drained off, and the Delta, instead of being extremely marshy, teems
with people.3 Today crops of grain can be harvested every three or
four months, instead of only once a year as they were in those days,
and then only if the Nile rose high enough for its waters to reach the
fields. The Middle Kingdom Egyptian did not have the shaduf-
much less the sdkiyeh turned by animals—to raise water for his
corps, and nowadays when a harvest fails, foodstuffs are easily
brought from distant lands. Then famine and uncontrolled pestilence
levied their toll until, we may take it, the population was even
smaller than before the Albanian Mohammed rAli and later the
Englishman Lord Cromer, began the reforms which have turned
Egypt into the almost over populated garden it is today.
With a population, thus, of little more than a million it is aston-
ishing how rapidly the inventions of the Asiatics spread throughout
the Nile Valley. The Hyksos were in Egypt according to our best
records for 108 years, yet between the beginning and the end of that
century the entire civilization of Egypt had been profoundly
changed.
2 Description de I’Egypte, 1, p. Iv.
3 Winlock, Slain Soldiers, p. i.
151
could help, our records of that century leave a great deal to be
desired, as we have already seen. Were it not for later references to
the events of that time, we should scarcely be able to point to a
single event of the period. Civil wars in Egypt and superior arms in
the hands of the foreigners seem to have made the invasion of the
Hyksos all but bloodless until the land was wholly theirs, but it
changed the life of the Nile people more than any event which
happened to them before the days of Alexander and Caesar.
The Egyptian was far from being numerous in the Middle King-
dom. The loss of probably only 60 men by Neb-hepet-Re*’ Montu-
hotpe in the battle which overthrew Heracleopolis shows what a
small nation his was in those days. Without doubt the population
of the land fluctuated a great deal as food was plentiful or scarce,
but in the most prosperous years of the Twelfth Dynasty we can be
certain it never was as large as the numbers who lived on the land
early in the Nineteenth Century a.d., and that we know was scarcely
more than two million persons.2 One must forget the enormous popu-
lation of today and take it that in the Middle Kingdom it was hardly
more than a million at the very outside. Now the swamps are all
drained off, and the Delta, instead of being extremely marshy, teems
with people.3 Today crops of grain can be harvested every three or
four months, instead of only once a year as they were in those days,
and then only if the Nile rose high enough for its waters to reach the
fields. The Middle Kingdom Egyptian did not have the shaduf-
much less the sdkiyeh turned by animals—to raise water for his
corps, and nowadays when a harvest fails, foodstuffs are easily
brought from distant lands. Then famine and uncontrolled pestilence
levied their toll until, we may take it, the population was even
smaller than before the Albanian Mohammed rAli and later the
Englishman Lord Cromer, began the reforms which have turned
Egypt into the almost over populated garden it is today.
With a population, thus, of little more than a million it is aston-
ishing how rapidly the inventions of the Asiatics spread throughout
the Nile Valley. The Hyksos were in Egypt according to our best
records for 108 years, yet between the beginning and the end of that
century the entire civilization of Egypt had been profoundly
changed.
2 Description de I’Egypte, 1, p. Iv.
3 Winlock, Slain Soldiers, p. i.