(February 7, 2013 at 12:30 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I have seen a great case made that the original Hyksos were brought in as a mercenary force ( they did have some interesting weapons technology that the Egyptians lacked) by one desperate rebel or another but being an ethnically and linguistically separate group they soon overthrew the warlord they were serving and set themselves up as the 15th dynasty. The civil war did not end although it did resolve itself into a fight between Upper and Lower Egypt which was eventually won by Ahmose I who founded the 18th dynasty.
It would make sense that the Hyksos who had the superior weapons technology became the rulers of the Hyksos kingdom. If the Egyptians used the term Habiru to include mercenaries, the Hyksos would have been regarded as Habiru at one time. Not that everyone agrees with the idea that the Hyksos took over by force.
You can't have a kingdom with just a ruling class, though, so the rest of the population did all the work required to keep a kingdom running. It's likely that some of the Hyksos kingdom's residents were native Egyptians while others were Habiru who had wandered in from various places and settled down. Some of the settlers could even have come from the tribes which eventually became the Israelites.
Did the ancient Egyptians have slaves? It seems that they did but their system was very complex. War captives appeared to have been landed with the really rotten jobs. Slaves And Slavery In Ancient Egypt
Was it just the ruling Hyksos class who left Egypt or did some of the ordinary population go as well? There's no way of knowing but it does seem as if bits and pieces of daily life in Egypt got mixed in with what became the Exodus story.
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?