After the reconsolidation of the Egyptian people, with perhaps an autocratic class of Semitic origin and a populace of indigenous Nilotic race, we have no trace of further connection with the far-away centre of Semitic culture in Babylonia till the time of the Theban hegemony.  Under the XIIth Dynasty we see Egyptians in friendly relations with the Bedawin of Idumsea and Southern Palestine.  Thus Sanehat, the younger son of Amenemhat I, when the death of his royal father was announced, fled from the new king Usertsen (Senusret) into Palestine, and there married the daughter of the chief Ammuanshi and became a Syrian chief himself, only finally returning to Egypt as an old man on the assurance of the royal pardon and favour.  We have in the reign of Usertsen (Senusret) II the famous visit of the Arab chief Abisha (Abeshu’) with his following to the court of Khnumhetep, the prince of the Oryx nome in Middle Egypt, as we see it depicted on the walls of Khnumhetep’s tomb at Beni Hasan.  We see Usertsen (Senusret) III invading Palestine to chastise the land of Sekmem and the vile Syrians.*

* We know of this campaign from the interesting historical stele of the general Sebek-khu (who took part in it), which was found during Mr. Garstang’s excavations at Abydos, not previously referred to above.  They were carried out in 1900, and resulted in the complete clearance of a part of the great cemetery which had been created during the XIIth Dynasty.  The group of objects from the tombs of this cemetery, and those of XVIIIth Dynasty tombs also found, is especially valuable as showing the styles of objects in use at these two periods (see Garstang, el-Ardbah, 1901).

The arm of Egypt was growing longer, and its weight was being felt in regions where it had previously been entirely unknown.  Eventually the collision came.  Egypt collided with an Asiatic power, and got the worst of the encounter.  So much the worse that the Theban monarchy of the Middle Kingdom was overthrown, and Northern Egypt was actually conquered by the Asiatic foreigners and ruled by a foreign house for several centuries.  Who these conquering Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, were no recent discovery has told us.  An old idea was that they were Mongols.  It was supposed that the remarkable faces of the sphinxes of Tanis, now in the Cairo Museum, which bore the names of Hyksos kings, were of Mongolian type, as also those of two colossal royal heads discovered by M. Naville at Bubastis.  But M. Golenischeff has now shown that these heads are really those of XIIth Dynasty kings, and not of Hyksos at all.  Messrs. Newberry and Garstang have lately endeavoured to show that this type was foreign, and probably connected with that of the Kheta, or Hittites, of Northern Syria, who came into prominence as enemies of Egypt at a later period.  They think that the type was introduced into the Egyptian royal family by Nefret, the queen of Usertsen (Senusret) II, whom they suppose to have been a Hittite princess.  At the same time they think it probable that the type was also that of the Hyksos, whom they consider to have been practically Hittites.  They therefore revive the theory of de Cara, which connects the Hyksos with the Hittites and these with the Pelasgi and Tyrseni.