was not used by the Egyptians to indicate a particular race.  It was used of all Bedouins, and in general of all the marauding tribes who infested the desert or the mountains.  The Shausu most frequently referred to on the monuments are those from the desert between Egypt and Syria, but there is a reference, in the time of Ramses II., to those from the Lebanon and the valley of Orontes.  Krall finds an allusion to them in a word (Shosim) in Judges ii. 14, which is generally translated by a generic expression, “the spoilers.”

*** Manetho declares that the people were called Hyksos, from Syk, which means “king” in the sacred language, and sos, which means “shepherd” in the popular language.  As a matter of fact, the word Hyku means “prince “in the classical language of Egypt, or, as Manetho styles it, the sacred language, i.e. in the idiom of the old religious, historical, and literary texts, which in later ages the populace no longer understood.  Shos, on the contrary, belongs to the spoken language of the later time, and does not occur in the ancient inscriptions, so that Manetho’s explanation is valueless; there is but one material fact to be retained from his evidence, and that is the name Hyk- Shos or Hyku-Shos given by its inventors to the alien kings.  Cham-pollion and Rosellini were the first to identify these Shos with the Shausu whom they found represented on the monuments, and their opinion, adopted by some, seems to me an extremely plausible one:  the Egyptians, at a given moment, bestowed the generic name of Shausu on these strangers, just as they had given those of Amuu and Manatiu.  The texts or writers from whom Manetho drew his information evidently mentioned certain kings hyku-Shausu; other passages, or, the same passages wrongly interpreted, were applied to the race, and were rendered hyku-Shausu = “the prisoners taken from the Shausu,” a substantive derived from the root haka = “to take” being substituted for the noun hyqu = “prince.”  Josephus declares, on the authority of Manetho, that some manuscripts actually suggested this derivation—­a fact which is easily explained by the custom of the Egyptian record offices.  I may mention, in passing, that Mariette recognised in the element “Sos” an Egyptian word shos = “soldiers,” and in the name of King Mirmashau, which he read Mirshosu, an equivalent of the title Hyq- Shosu.

But we are without any clue as to their real name, language, or origin.  The writers of classical times were unable to come to an agreement on these questions:  some confounded the Hyksos with the Phoenicians, others regarded them as Arabs.* Modern scholars have put forward at least a dozen contradictory hypotheses on the matter.  The Hyksos have been asserted to have been Canaanites, Elamites, Hittites, Accadians, Scythians.  The last opinion found great favour with the learned, as long as they could