B.C. ?]

KHIAN, EMBRACER OF LANDS

173

The latter group consists of three names, i.e., (1)

KHIAN, who took as his Horus name the title "ANQ

3

UATCHET, and (3) (112 IPEQ-HERU. The

4

first of these names is known to us from a much-broken colossal statue of the king which was found at Bubastis by M. Naville; portions of a second statue were also found, but the name of Khian, which must have been inscribed upon it also, was erased, and an inscription of Osorkon II. was cut over the older inscription. These portions, including the head, which is probably to be regarded as a portrait of king Khian, are now in the British Museum; the portions of the first statue, which still bear the name of Khian, are preserved in the Museum of Cairo. Khian's name as "king of the South and North," i.e., SE-USER-EN-RA, occurs on a small rough basalt lion,5 which was obtained at Baghdad by the late Mr. George Smith, and the name of the king was found by Mr. A. J. Evans upon a jar lid which he discovered in the course of his excavations in the Mycenaean palace of Knossos (Kephala) in Crete. On inscribed seals and cylinders Khian is described as

1 See Naville, Bubastis, 1891, plate 12.

2 British Museum, No. 32,319,

3 British Museum, Nos. 32,441, 32,344.

4 British Museum, Nos. 1063, 1064.

5 British Museum, 'No. 987.

174

KHIAN, PRINCE OF DESERTS

[B.C.?

"ḥeq semtu," Δ i.e., "prince of the deserts";

this peculiar title, taken in connection with his remarkable Horus name mentioned above, the foreign type of

Se-user-en-Ra Khian, King of Egypt. British Museum, No. 1063.

the name Khian, and the un-Egyptian character of his portrait heads from Bubastis, as well as the fact that his chief monuments are all found in Lower Egypt,

B.C. ?]

KHIAN'S NAME AT KNOSSOS

175

have been usually regarded as proofs that this king belonged to the Hyksos Dynasty. In late years, however, it has been maintained, solely on the ground of arguments based upon the style of his scarabs, that he belongs to the period of the Xth Dynasty; but such arguments are inconclusive, for although these scarabs do in many respects resemble those of the VIth and VIIth Dynasties, and are very similar to those which we have tentatively ascribed to the IXth Dynasty, yet these resemblances are not strong enough to enable us to set aside the weighty evidence which we have duly set forth above, from which it may be assumed with some show of reason that Khian was a Hyksos king. This view receives very substantial confirmation from Mr. Evans' discovery of Khian's name at Knossos, for the oldest parts of the palace which he discovered there may well be as old as B.c. 1800, the date which may be roughly assigned to the Hyksos period. If the scarabs of Khian belong, in reality, to the time of the Hyksos, the scarabs of Maa-ab-Ra and other kings, whom we have provisionally assigned to the IXth Dynasty, may belong to a period subsequent to the XIIth Dynasty. The scarabs of Ipeq-Heru and Uatchet are identical in style with those of Khian, and their names are of the same foreign character; it follows therefore that if Khian was a Hyksos king, Ipeq-Heru and Uatchet were Hyksos kings, and they must have reigned about the same time, i.e., about B.C. 1800. We are, then, not justified in assuming

176

END OF THE EARLY EMPIRE

[B.C. ?

that an invasion of Egypt by Asiatic tribes, who entered the country by way of the Delta, took place in the period between the VIIIth and XIth Dynasties; the only invasion of the kind known to us was that of the Hyksos, which took place several hundreds of years later.

Another invasion which was formerly ascribed to this period, i.e., that of the "New Race," who were on insufficient grounds described as "Libyans," has now for several years past been recognized as never having taken place. The "New Race" were simply, as M.J. de Morgan has pointed out, the primitive Egyptians who lived in the period preceding the Ist Dynasty. The Xth Dynasty ends the Early Empire, the closing years of which were, as we have seen above, marked by strife and civil war, caused by the persistent attempts of the princes of Thebes, a city hitherto unknown in Egyptian history, to obtain the mastery of the Two Lands. The result is that the knowledge of this period which we possess is of the scantiest description, but the principal facts of which we can be certain, and the theories upon which most reliance can be placed, will be found to have been given above.

( 177 )

CHAPTER VII.

THE MIDDLE EMPIRE.

THE ELEVENTH DYNASTY. FROM THEBES.

WE have already mentioned that under the rule of the kings of the Xth Dynasty, i.e., Ka-meri-Rā and his predecessors, the princes of Siut formed a bulwark of the kings at Herakleopolis against the persistent attacks of the princes of Thebes. This city, which is generally alluded to in the inscriptions of the period as the "city of the south," now for the first time comes into prominence, and prepares to assume the predominant position which it occupied in Egyptian history for more than two thousand years. Ancient Thebes stood on both sides of the Nile, and was commonly called "Uast"

; that part of the city which was situated on the east bank, and which included the temples of Karnak and Luxor, appears to have been called Apet,

whence, by the addition of the feminine article Ta-,

, comes the Greek form of the name, Onßai,

mentioned in the Iliad of Homer (ix. 381 ff.), a passage

VOL. II.

N