* The Hyksos invasion has been regarded as a natural result
     of the Elamite conquest.

A tradition, picked up by Herodotus on his travels, relates that the Phoenicians had originally peopled the eastern and southern shores of the Persian Gulf;* it was also said that Indathyrses, a Scythian king, had victoriously scoured the whole of Asia, and had penetrated as far as Egypt.** Either of these invasions may have been the cause of the Syrian migration.  In. comparison with the meagre information which has come down to us under the form of legends, it is provoking to think how much actual fact has been lost, a tithe of which would explain the cause of the movement and the mode of its execution.  The least improbable hypothesis is that which attributes the appearance of the Shepherds about the XXIIIrd century B.C., to the arrival in Naharaim of those Khati who subsequently fought so obstinately against the armies both of the Pharaohs and the Ninevite kings.  They descended from the mountain region in which the Halys and the Euphrates take their rise, and if the bulk of them proceeded no further than the valleys of the Taurus and the Amanos, some at least must have pushed forward as far as the provinces on the western shores of the Dead Sea.  The most adventurous among them, reinforced by the Canaanites and other tribes who had joined them on their southward course, crossed the isthmus of Suez, and finding a people weakened by discord, experienced no difficulty in replacing the native dynasties by their own barbarian chiefs.***

     * It was to the exodus of this race, in the last analysis,
     that the invasion of the shepherds may be attributed

** A certain number of commentators are of opinion that the wars attributed to Indathyrses have been confounded with what Herodotus tells of the exploits of Madyes, and are nothing more than a distorted remembrance of the great Scythian invasion which took place in the latter half of the VIIth century B.C.

*** At the present time, those scholars who admit the Turanian origin of the Hyksos are of opinion that only the nucleus of the race, the royal tribe, was composed of Mongols, while the main body consisted of elements of all kinds—­Canaanitish, or, more generally, Semitic.

[Illustration:  079.jpg PALLATE OF HYKSOS SCRIBE]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by M. de Mertons. 
     It is the palette of a scribe, now in the Berlin Museum, and
     given by King Apopi II Ausirri to a scribe named Atu.

Both their name and origin were doubtless well known to the Egyptians, but the latter nevertheless disdained to apply to them any term but that of “she-mau,"* strangers, and in referring to them used the same vague appellations which they applied to the Bedouin of the Sinaitic peninsula,—­Monatiu, the shepherds, or Satiu, the archers.  They succeeded in hiding the original name of their conquerors so thoroughly, that in the end they themselves forgot it, and kept the secret of it from posterity.