Second Intermediate Period (Fifteenth-Seventeenth Dynasty; c. 1650-1550 BC)

During the Thirteenth Dynasty dynastic stability ended and dozens of kings reigned in quick succession. They came from different lineages and some of them were possibly even of Asiatic origin. Royal mortuary cults for the Twelfth Dynasty kings ceased.

Yet, contacts with the Levant were maintained and more and more Asiatics came to Egypt. When the central government finally fragmented, several rulers emerged with authority over small kingdoms in the Nile Delta. One group of these rulers, the Hyksos (Rulers of Foreign Lands), of the later Fifteenth Dynasty, gained power, conquered Memphis, and established their residence at Avaris (modern Tell el-Daba) in the eastern Nile Delta.

The rulers of the Seventeenth Dynasty in Thebes, the successors of the Thirteenth Dynasty, started what they saw as a ‘war of liberation’ against the Hyksos who had sealed an alliance with the Kushite kings of Nubia and had sandwiched Upper Egypt between the two powers. In a series of battles, the Theban rulers were finally able to defeat the Hyksos and the first king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Ahmose (c. 1550-1525 BC), drove them out of Egypt.

The Hyksos Capital at Avaris. Although only limited areas of the Hyksos capital at Avaris have been excavated, they have revealed an occupation that possibly stretches from to the First Intermediate Period to the early Eighteenth Dynasty. The earliest archaeological settlement remains stem, however, from a workmen’s village of the early Twelfth Dynasty. The remains of an enclosure wall that were found to the north led to the assumption that the whole settlement was once surrounded by a mud-brick wall. The settlement was home for more than one thousand people. A hiatus separates this settlement from the end of the Twelfth Dynasty when the site was resettled by Canaanites.

The houses had a central wide room typical of a style prevalent in Syria from the fourth millennium BC. Furthermore, there were cemeteries attached directly to the houses, a custom derived from Middle Bronze Age Syro- Palestine. Surprisingly, foreign pottery from the Levant makes up only 20% of the assemblage, although burials of males showed that half of them had weapons of Levantine origin and possibly indicate that they were in the service of the Egyptian crown.

The layers dating to the Thirteenth Dynasty revealed an Egyptian palace in layout with attached gardens and a cemetery with donkey, goat, and sheep burials. The donkey burials especially are a foreign element in Egypt but are well known during the Middle Bronze Age in the Levant. This evidence clearly shows that the administration of the palace was in the hands of Asiatics. By the middle of the eighteenth century BC the site was partially abandoned, most likely due to an epidemic, before being resettled.

Foreign ceramics now made up to 40% of the assemblage and the site increased dramatically, covering an area of 250 ha, three times the size of the contemporary city of Hazor in modern Israel. International trade flourished in the Hyksos period with imports from the Aegean and the Levant. In the Hyksos period, Avaris also had a huge citadel with vineyards and gardens.