Act 1 -- Of Arms And The Man: The 15th Century Bc

In about the year 1477 BC, in the city of Peru-nefer in the Nile delta of Lower Egypt, quite close to the Mediterranean Sea, Pharaoh Thutmose III ordered the construction of a grand palace with elaborate frescoes.

Minoan artists from distant Crete were hired to create these frescoes.

They painted pictures never seen before in Egypt—strange scenes of men leaping over bulls—with the paint applied to the plaster while it was still wet, in an al fresco style so that the colors became part of the wall itself.

It was a technique, and a scene, that they had learned on Crete in the Aegean. The unique images created in this manner were now in vogue not only in Egypt but also at palaces up and down the coast, from northern Canaan to the Egyptian delta at sites now known as Kabri in Israel, Alalakh in Turkey, Qatna in Syria, and Dab‘a in Egypt.1

Peru-nefer, the city in the delta, has now been identified with modern Tell ed-Dab‘a. It is a site that has been excavated by the Austrian archaeologist Manfred Bietak and his team since 1966.

The city had also previously been known as Avaris, capital city of the Hyksos, the hated invaders of Egypt who ruled much of the country from ca. 1720 to 1550 BC.

Avaris was transformed into Peru-nefer, a valued Egyptian metropolis, after its capture by Thutmose’s ancestor the Egyptian pharaoh Kamose around the year 1550 BC.

In uncovering a formerly wealthy city now buried under meters of sand and debris, Bietak brought both the Hyksos capital city and the later Egyptian metropolis back to life over the course of four decades.

He also recovered the amazing fresco paintings created by Minoans, or possibly local artisans trained by the Minoans, which date to the early Eighteenth Dynasty (about 1450 BC).2 These serve as a good example of the internationalized world that began to coalesce in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean after the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt.

Harkening Back To The Hyksos

The Hyksos had first invaded Egypt in about the year 1720 BC, 250 years before Thutmose III.

They stayed for 200 years, until 1550 BC.

At the time that the Hyksos overran the country, Egypt was one of the established powers in the ancient Near East.

The pyramids of Giza were:

• already 1,000 years old by then
• built during the 4th Dynasty in the Old Kingdom period.

Manetho was an Egyptian priest who lived during the much-later Hellenistic period in the 3rd century BC.

• He identified the Hyksos as “Shepherd Kings”—a mistranslation of the Egyptian phrase hekau khasut, which actually means “chieftains of foreign lands.”

Hyksos were Semites who migrated into Egypt from Canaan which was modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

• They were “Asiatic” merchants and traders bringing their goods into the country.

They had:

• composite bows that could shoot arrows much farther
• horse-drawn chariots not previously seen in Egypt.

The Hyksos invasion of Egypt ended the Middle Kingdom period (ca. 2134–1720 BC).

• They ruled over Egypt from their capital city of Avaris in the Nile delta, during the 2nd Intermediate period (Dynasties Fifteen–Seventeen) for nearly 200 years, from 1720 to 1550 BC.

It is one of the only times during the period from 3000 to 1200 BC when Egypt was ruled by foreigners.

In this period there was The Quarrel of the Hyksos king Apophis and the Egyptian king Seknenre about 1550 BC.

• Apophis complains of being kept awake by the noise from hippopotami kept in a pond by Seknenre

The mummy of Seknenre shows from skull wounds by a battle-ax that he died violently in battle.

The pharaoh Kamose was the last king of the Seventeenth Dynasty of Egypt.

• He was ruling from his home in Thebes, in Upper Egypt.
• He gives details on the final victorious battle against the Hyksos, whom he refers to as “Asiatics,” writing as follows in about 1550 BC:

Kamose

I sailed north in my might to repel the Asiatics … with my brave army before me like a flame of fire and the … archers atop our fighting-tops to destroy their places…. I passed the night in my ship, my heart happy; and when day dawned I was upon him as if it were a hawk. When breakfast time came, I overthrew him having destroyed his walls and slaughtered his people, and made his wife descend to the riverbank. My army acted like lions with their spoil … chattles, cattle, fat, honey … dividing their things, their hearts joyful. As for Avaris on the Two Rivers, I laid it waste without inhabitants; I destroyed their towns and burned their homes to reddened ruin-heaps forever, because of the destruction they had wrought in the midst of Egypt: they who had allowed themselves to hearken to the call of the Asiatics, (who) had forsaken Egypt their mistress!

The Hyksos fled back to Retenu (modern-day Israel and Syria also known to the Egyptians as Pa-ka-na-na, or Canaan).

The Egyptians, meanwhile, established the Eighteenth Dynasty, begun by Kamose’s brother Ahmose, which initiated what we now call the New Kingdom period in Egypt.

Avaris and the rest of Egypt were rebuilt during this period, and Avaris itself was renamed.

By the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III some sixty years later, ca. 1500 BC, it was once again a flourishing city, this time known as Peru-nefer, with palaces decorated with Minoan-style frescoes depicting bullleaping and other scenes more clearly at home on Crete in the Aegean than in Egypt proper.

One archaeologist has speculated that there may even have been a royal marriage between an Egyptian ruler and a Minoan princess.7

There are certainly a number of later Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian pharaohs who married foreign princesses, primarily to cement diplomatic bonds or a treaty with a foreign power, as we shall see below, but it is not necessary to invoke politically instigated marriages to explain the occurrence of Minoan wall paintings in Egypt, since there is other independent evidence for contacts between the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and, in this case, the Aegean.

Minoan manufactured objects had been transported to Mesopotamia by the 18th century BC, nearly 4,000 years ago.

This is proven by the ancient site of Mari, on the western side of the Euphrates River in modern Syria.

• French archaeologists there excavated more than 20,000 Akkadian clay tablets during the 1930s.
• They wrote records of the kings of Mari, including one named Zimri-Lim who ruled ca. 1750 BC.

One tablet writes about the ice that ZimriLim was using in his summer drinks, which included wine, beer, and fermented barley-based drinks flavored with either pomegranate juice or licorice-like aniseed.

DISCOVERY AND OVERVIEW OF THE MINOANS

The Mari letters mention the Minoans, and a possible Minoan interpreter (or an interpreter for the Minoans), present at the site of Ugarit in north Syria during the early eighteenth century BC, where they were receiving tin that had been sent westward from Mari.14

However, there seems to have been a special relationship with Egypt beginning in the fifteenth century, during the time of Hatshepsut and then Thutmose III, which is why our tale begins at this point in time.

Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900s called them the Minoan civilization.

We don’t actually know what they called themselves.

The Egyptians, Canaanites, and Mesopotamians had different names for them.

They established a civilization on Crete during the 3rd millennium BC that lasted until ca. 1200 BC.

Around 1700 BC, the island was hit by a devastating earthquake that required the rebuilding of the palaces at Knossos and elsewhere.

However, the Minoans recovered quickly and flourished as an independent civilization until Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland invaded them in the second millennium.

• They continued under Mycenaean rule until everything collapsed ca. 1200 BC.

Evans named the newly discovered civilization as “Minoan” after King Minos of Greek legend.

• He ruled Crete during ancient times, complete with a Minotaur (half man, half bull) in the labyrinthine subterranean extensions of the palace.

Evans found numerous clay tablets, and other objects, with writing on them—in both Linear A (still undeciphered) and Linear B (an early form of Greek probably brought to Crete by the Mycenaeans).

However, he never did discover the real name of these people, and, as mentioned, it remains unknown to this day —despite more than a century of continuous excavation not only at Knossos but at numerous other sites on Crete as well.17

Evans uncovered numerous imports from Egypt and the Near East at Knossos, including an alabaster lid inscribed in hieroglyphs with “the good god, Seweserenre, son of Re, Khyan.”18 Khyan, one of the best-known Hyksos kings, ruled during the early years of the sixteenth century BC. His objects have been found across the ancient Near East, but how this lid got to Crete is still a mystery.

Of additional interest is an Egyptian alabaster vase found many years later during another archaeologist’s excavation in a tomb at the site of Katsamba on Crete, one of the port cities on the north coast related to Knossos. It is inscribed with the royal name of Pharaoh Thutmose III: “the good god Men-kheper-Re, son of Re, Thutmose perfect in transformations.” It is one of the only objects bearing his name to be found in the Aegean.19

The 5th-century Greek historian Thucydides claimed that the Minoans had a navy and ruled the seas during this period:

“And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.3– 8). To earlier scholars, this became known as the “Minoan Thalassocracy,” from kratia meaning power and thalassos meaning sea. Although this supposed Minoan naval supremacy has now been called into question, there are mentions of “Keftiu-boats” in the Egyptian records—Keftiu being the Egyptian term for Crete at that time—although it is unclear whether these were boats from Crete, going to Crete, or built in a Minoan manner.

Evans’s successor at the site, John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury, was extremely interested in the possible connections between Egypt and Crete; he excavated at the Egyptian site of Amarna (Akhenaten’s capital city, of which we will speak more below) as well as at Knossos.

Pendlebury even published a monograph on the topic, entitled Aegyptiaca, in which he collected and cataloged all of the Egyptian imports found at Knossos and elsewhere on the island, before being shot to death by German paratroopers when they invaded Crete in 1941.

Evans and Pendlebury found additional imported objects at Knossos, and it has become clear over the ensuing decades that the Minoans seem to have been in both the import and the export business, industriously networking with a number of foreign areas in addition to Egypt. For instance, cylinder seals from Mesopotamia and storage jars from Canaan have been found at various sites on Crete in Middle and Late Bronze Age contexts, while Minoan pottery and other finished objects, or at least mentions of them, have been found in countries stretching from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Cyprus to Syria and Iraq.