The Hyksos: A New Investigation
Encyclopedia
The Hyksos
Hyksos
The Hyksos were an Asiatic people who took over the eastern Nile Delta during the twelfth dynasty, initiating the Second Intermediate Period of ancient Egypt....

: A New Investigation
is a book by John Van Seters
John Van Seters
John Van Seters is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Currently University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He took his PhD at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies...

 published in 1966 by Yale University Press
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....

.

The main contribution of this volume is a careful linguistic
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 analysis by Van Seters in which he argues that the Ipuwer Papyrus
Ipuwer papyrus
The Ipuwer Papyrus is a single papyrus holding an ancient Egyptian poem, called The Admonitions of Ipuwer or The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All. Its official designation is Papyrus Leiden I 344 recto...

 does not belong to the First Intermediate Period of Egyptian History (c. 2300-2200 BCE), as previously thought, but rather to the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1700-1600 BCE). Van Seters' case has not been universally accepted by Egyptologists, who continue to suggest a range of dates for the composition of Ipuwer.

Given a revised chronology, such as that suggested by David Rohl
David Rohl
New Chronology is the term used to describe an alternative Chronology of the ancient Near East developed by English Egyptologist David Rohl and other researchers beginning with A Test of Time: The Bible - from Myth to History in 1995...

, Van Seters' dating could lend support to the theory (presented by other scholars, though not discussed by Van Seters) that the Ipuwer Document, which contains such statements as "The River is blood", describes conditions in Egypt at the time of the Biblical Exodus.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK