Were the Hyksos of Hebrew Origin?

Summary

The Hyksos were Asiatics who filtered into the eastern Egyptian Delta around the middle of the Thirteenth Dynasty taking advantage of a period of internal Egyptian weakness, probably bringing with them and using to their own advantage, the chariot. The Thirteenth Dynasty rulers had moved the capital of the country north to a centrally located town called Itjtawy near Memphis, near the apex of the Delta. Seizing the kingship, the Hyksos ruled Egypt went on to rule Egypt for over one hundred years under the Fifteenth Dynasty. The heterogeneous Sixteenth Dynasty was partly Hyksos, but also composed of local Egyptian rulers who had no choice but to go along with their new overlords. This general period of Egyptian weakness and foreign occupation is called the Second Intermediate Period, or more popularly, the Hyksos Period. The local princes of Thebes in the south formed the Seventeenth Dynasty when the Hyksos overran Itjtawy and ended the ephemeral 13th Dynasty. These vigorous Theban rulers kept the flame of Egyptian independence alive and were finally were able to lead a war of liberation that expelled the Asiatics. The Hyksos rulers and their military forces were driven from Egypt. Egypt was free, and Ahmose and his successors of the Eighteenth Dynasty could henceforth turn to the task of reconstruction. Some historians have linked various biblical stories to the beginning or the end of the Hyksos regime, but no consensus has emerged around any of the identifications.

Hyksos in popular culture

The invasion and subsequent expulsion of the Hyksos form an integral part in the fictional 'Egypt' novels by Wilbur Smith, notably River God, The Seventh Scroll and Warlock ("Egyptian Series"), in the Lords of the Two Lands trilogy by Pauline Gedge which chronicles the campaigns of Sequenenre, Kamose and Ahmose against them, and in Andre Norton's novel "Shadow Hawk".