Hyksos people

The Hyksos (means ‘ruler of foreign lands’) were a people of mixed origins from Western Asia, who settled in the eastern Nile Delta, sometime before 1650 BC.

A potential disruption to Phoenician-Egyptian trade rose in the 18th century BC in the form of an invasion by the Hyksos people.

The Hyksos took over rule of Bobos and much of Phoenicia and Syria ejecting the Amorite rulers, and by about 1720 BC had even conquered Egypt. The invasion of Hyksos people on Egyptian Middle Kingdom was the first military conquest in the history of human civilization and they ruled it for one hundred years (1680-1580 BC).

As it turned out, the Hyksos did nothing but further develop the trade lines throughout the eastern Mediterranean, as doing so enabled them to sustain their own imperial ambitions.

One technology that was introduced Egypt at the time of the Hyksos’s military conquest was the horse-drawn chariot. Hyksos were the first people who introduced the domestic horse into Africa.

This new chariot culture bestowed by the Hyksos provided the New Kingdom with an unprecedented military might with which it expanded its borders as far as the upper course of the Euphrates River in Iraq.

In 1570 BC the Egyptian prince Ahmose I (1570-45 BC) launched a war against the Hyksos, a war that was continued by Thutmose III (ca, 1504-145 BC). This ware eventually pushed the Hyksos out of their Egyptian and Phoenician gains and established Egypt as the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
Hyksos people