The Enigma of the Hyksos, Volume 1: ASOR Conference Boston 2017—ICAANE Conference Munich 2018—Collected Papers

Abstract

In 1966 John Van Seters published The Hyksos: A New Investigation (Yale University Press). In a small-format book of only 220 pages, Van Seters presented a comprehensive, up-to-date (as of the early 1960s), and generally well-reasoned account of those West Asiatics who migrated down to Egypt beginning in the late Middle Kingdom and eventually came to rule northern Egypt for more than a century during the second quarter of the second millennium BC. The Aigyptiaca of the third-century BC priest Manetho called them “Hyksos” (from the Egyptian term ḥḳ3-ḫ3swt, “rulers of foreign lands”). Their residence was at a place called Avaris, which Van Seters concluded was in the Khata‘na-Qantir district along the ancient Pelusiac branch of the Nile in the northeastern part of the Delta. One of the few surviving tells in that district was an enormous site known as Tell el-Dab‘a.The year 1966 also saw the initiation of excavations at Tell el-Dab‘a by Professor Manfred Bietak, of the University of Vienna. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Tell el-Dab‘a project has expanded and transformed our understanding of every aspect of Hyksos studies. Bietak led this remarkable archaeological project for more than four decades, eventually turning over directorship of the field project in 2009 to Dr. Irene Forstner-Müller, a former student of Bietak and the current director of the Cairo Branch of the Austrian Archaeological Institute. Later Egyptian sources propagandistically described the Asiatics in bold, simple terms—cruel, barbarous, destructive invaders from somewhere in the East—but research linked to the Tell el-Dab‘a excavations has given us a very different picture of these people, as the book under review here clearly demonstrates. The literature on the Hyksos is now so immense that few people outside those who specialize in their study can hope to keep up with all the relevant publications that have appeared in the past half century.A five-year (2016–2021) grant from the European Research Council has been funding research arising from the Tell el-Dab‘a fieldwork. Bietak heads the investigatory team, which is hosted by the Austrian Archaeological Institute, with Bournemouth University cohosting the project. The Hyksos Enigma Project's website (https://thehyksosenigma.oeaw.ac.at) lists six overarching areas of research, the first three of which—the origins and ethnicity of the West Asiatic population in the Eastern Delta, their migration into Egypt, and Levantine culture in Egypt and interconnections during the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period—form the primary focus of The Enigma of the Hyksos, Volume 1. The second volume in this series has the subtitle, The Hyksos and Egypt: Acculturation Studies; Processes of Acculturation of the Asiatic Population at Tell el-Dabʿa (Avaris) during the Late Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period; it was scheduled to appear in 2021.The essays in the first volume constitute, with one exception (a paper by Silvia Prell and Lorenz Rahmstorf), the revised and expanded versions of papers originally delivered at two workshops having the same main title as the book. The first workshop was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) in Boston in November 2017; the second took place at the 11th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE) in Munich in April 2018. The 26 essays are sandwiched between a Preface, where Bietak offers a compact advance guide to the contents of the individual essays, and the Concluding Remarks, where he offers some personal interpretations of the data and sums up the progress of the project's research. Nonspecialists wanting to obtain a quick appreciation of the essays before diving into the 400+ pages of contributions might benefit by reading the Preface and Concluding Remarks first, then looking at the articles.The social and cultural background and material culture heritage of Tell el-Dab‘a's West Asiatic population receive considerable attention in a number of articles (by D'Andrea; Bietak; Burke; Candelora; Prell [two articles]; and Mourad). Domestic and international connections and regional developments in Egypt and the Levant in the first half of the second millennium BC are another important focus of the essays (Marcus; Prell and Rahmstorf; Lilyquist; Cateloy; Vilain; Sacco). Other topics covered include Asiatic social mobility and migration into Egypt (Priglinger); the Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware pottery manufactured at Tell el-Maskhuta; bioarchaeological studies at Tell el-Dab‘a (Maaranen, Schutkowski, Zakrzewski, Stantis, and Zink; Stantis and Schutkowski; Maaranen, Schutkowski, and Zakrze-wski); the comparative radiocarbon dating of Ashkelon and Tell el-Dab‘a (Bruins and van der Plicht); and the development of the Asiatic settlement at Tell el-Dab‘a (Gómez Senovilla).Marta D'Andrea opens the essay section with an investigation into the principal socio-cultural complexes in the Levant at the end of the Early Bronze Age and beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. She postulates that mobility and interregional connections led to “the emergence of gradually homogenized cultural sets across the Near East” (which in the Levant she labels the “Greater Levantine Area”), while allowing for the continuation of “regional traditions and differences” (15). Her focus in the north is on the important site of Ebla, especially its palaces and temples, while in the southern Levant she emphasizes the intra- and intercultural connections reflected in certain material-culture phenomena such as the weaponry associated with “warrior burials.”Bietak has long argued that the elite among the Asiatics who migrated down to Egypt in the late Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties and eventually became the overlords of northern Egypt came from the northern Levant. In this volume, he convincingly demonstrates that the design of Tell el-Dab‘a's cultic structures, especially those described as broad-room temples, had their architectural origins in North Syria and northern Mesopotamia. Based on Bietak's work, there can be little doubt that those areas had an outsized influence on the growth and development of Tell el-Dab‘a's religious architecture; the same geographical origin appears to be true of its palaces—but does that also mean that the origin of the Hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty is to be sought in the northern Levant? That is the key, though never stated, implication of a number of papers in this volume.Next, Aaron Burke looks at the factors affecting the commercial, political, and military relations between Egypt and the Levant during the Middle Kingdom. He notes, for example, the presence of Amorite names in the Execration Texts and asks how we should understand the presence of Amorites in Egypt already in the early Middle Kingdom (71–76). He explains the makeup of the mercantile community at Tell el-Dab‘a as likely being similar to the phenomenon of multiple merchant groups being active at the Old Assyrian trade colony at Kanesh Kultepe in central Anatolia. He traces the increasing numbers of Asiatics at Tell el-Dab‘a and that site's growing commerce with the Levant from Stratum H, contemporary with the MB I (= Bietak's MB IIA) period, through Stratum F, which reflects the transition from MB I to MB II (Bietak's transitional MB IIA/B), and proposes that the population consists of Asiatics following the Amorite traditions of the Levantine Middle Bronze Age. Sadly, we do not yet have evidence for the identification of the specific groups residing at Tell el-Dab‘a.Danielle Candelora's paper interprets the presence of one or more severed human right hands in pits at Tell el-Dab‘a in contexts contemporary with the early Hyksos period as evidence for amputation of the hands of individuals who had been found guilty of certain, as yet unidentifiable, offenses; reference is made to this brutal judicial practice in the Old Babylonian law code of Hammurabi. Since the Egyptian practice of severing the hands of enemy soldiers after battle is otherwise unattested prior to the New Kingdom, Candelora's explanation is an attractive one. It is not the only option, however. She might have considered Tomb P19 at Jericho, an MB IIB tomb in which six individuals were found buried simultaneously after being bludgeoned to death, with all three males in the group having had their right hand cut off (for the most recent discussion of the Jericho burials as representing war victims, see Kletter and Levy 2018: 684–87, fig. 16.13).In a pair of articles, Silvia Prell details the archaeological history of two well-known funerary practices of non-Egyptian origin that appear at Tell el-Dab‘a: equid (i.e., donkey) burials and the so-called warrior burials. The interment of equids to accompany the deceased already appears in the southern Levant and Egypt in EB I, subsequently disappearing in Egypt until the early second millennium BC, when the practice reappears at Tell el-Dab‘a starting in the late Middle Kingdom and subsequently at several other sites in the Eastern Delta. The custom was common in the Near East from Mesopotamia across to northern Syria and southern Anatolia in the third millennium BC (when chariots are occasionally found with the equids); a few possible examples of the practice may also appear in the southern Levant in this period. Inasmuch as neither in Egypt nor the Levant were chariots used in the third or early second millennium BC, the author reasonably suggests that in those areas the donkey burials signify the high status of the deceased; whether the burials may also have served some cultic function is unknown. As for the “warrior burials,” graves containing sets of weapons appear at scattered sites from Mesopotamia across to northern Syria and Anatolia as early as EB I–II, are ubiquitous in the Levant in EB III–IV and MB IIA, then become limited mostly to sites in the southern Levant in MB IIB–C and the Late Bronze Age, and, finally, reappear at a few southern sites and curiously also in Mesopotamia and Iran in the Iron Age. Prell's two contributions provide a welcome archaeological history of these two funerary practices. It is regrettable that many of the maps showing the geographical distribution of these customs are so small that a magnifying glass will be necessary for some readers to make out the site labels. The same excessive reduction in the size of illustrations and/or their labels occurs with some of Prell's plans, the plan of the Carnarvon Tomb 62 complex in western Thebes in Lilyquist's article later on, and in several graphs in the essay by Sacco.Ezra Marcus's paper continues that author's long-term investigation into east Mediterranean commercial relations in the Middle Bronze Age. Here Marcus looks at the role of Tell el-Dab‘a in maritime commerce during the early and late Middle Kingdom. For the early Middle Kingdom he notes the limited number of Egyptian ceramic pieces at Sidon in Lebanon and Tel Ifshar in Israel, the scarabs in the famous Montet Jar deposit at Byblos, as well as several Egyptian textual sources referencing Egyptian commercial and military contacts with the Levant. As for the late Middle Kingdom, he focuses primarily on Levantine ceramic imports (their area of production based on petrographic analyses) discovered at Tell el-Dab‘a, as well as on the Egyptian pottery found at Sidon and several sites in the southern Levant. He views the location and harbor facilities of Tell el-Dab‘a as facilitating the establishment of Avaris as one of the major players in east Mediterranean commerce during the height of the Middle Bronze Age. It became the premier port of entry for Mediterranean trade into Egypt. Whether it really qualifies as “Venice on the Nile,” to use Marcus's colorful term for the site in an earlier publication, is another story.Prell and Rahmstorf's contribution describes a remarkable group of iron oxide weights from a tomb of the middle Hyksos period (Stratum D/3) at Tell el-Dab‘a. The tomb, which held the remains of five burials, was excavated in 1966 in Area A/I and is published here for the first time. Among its contents were two sets of weights, one reflecting the older, Egyptian weighing system, the other based on the shekel weighing system of Syria and Mesopotamia. The latter system only came into common use in Egypt in the New Kingdom; as such, this find presages the integration of Egyptian mercantilism into Near Eastern commercial practices during the Late Bronze Age.In contrast to the lively commercial relations of Tell el-Dab‘a with Cyprus and the Levant in the Hyksos period, Thebes may have been something of a commercial backwater for at least part of the Second Intermediate Period. The contribution by Lilyquist examines the material finds in a tomb complex located in the Asasif in Western Thebes. Labeled Carnarvon Tomb 62, this large Middle Kingdom complex was reused for burials in the late Second Intermediate Period and early Eighteenth Dynasty. It was first excavated by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon in 1911–1913, later by Ambrose Lansing in 1915–1916 on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Regionalization of Egyptian material culture in the Second Intermediate Period has been the subject of much discussion in recent years. The late Second Intermediate Period (rishi-coffin) use-phase of Carnarvon Tomb 62 is characterized by pottery and other finds that differ considerably from what appears in contemporary assemblages in northern Egypt; in fact, the few non-Theban connections in the tomb mostly point upriver to Nubia. The one item that links Thebes to the north in this period is a scarab inscribed with the name Maaibre, which most likely was the prenomen of the Hyksos king Sheshi. A change in the character of the burial offerings takes place during the transition to the Eighteenth Dynasty, at which time the tomb goods evince a renewal of contacts with northern Egypt and even the Levantine world.Elisa Priglinger's contribution to the volume is more theoretical than descriptive. Her paper examines the twin topics of mobility and migration, pointing out that the two activities do not necessarily mean the same thing. It investigates what effects climate change (especially as seen in increasing aridity), the creation of small-scale trade and eventually much larger east Mediterranean trade networks, the search for raw materials in Sinai and the Eastern Desert, and military activities in the Levant at the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BC may have had on the migration of increasing numbers of Asiatics into the Eastern Delta and Nile Valley starting in the Middle Kingdom. The paper distinguishes the “push factors” from the “pull factors” that guided people to migrate from one area to another and which eventually led to the establishment of a West Asiatic mini-state in the Eastern Delta. Finally, it offers a preview of what would become the topic of the follow-up Hyksos Enigma Project workshop, which took place in Vienna in December 2019 and had the title “Changing Clusters and Migration in the Near Eastern Bronze Age.”Next, Anna-Latifa Mourad looks at “Cultural Interference”—specifically, how the Egyptian concept of the storm god, as represented by the god Seth, morphed over time, from the Middle Kingdom to the Nineteenth Dynasty. As the result of the interconnections and ever-changing relations between Egypt and Syria, where Baal was Seth's counterpart, Seth became the principal deity of Avaris in the Hyksos period, and by the Nineteenth Dynasty the names Seth and Baal became interchangeable in Egypt. Mourad suggests that the internationalism of Egyptian religion in the New Kingdom had its roots in the Second Intermediate Period and points to Egyptian contacts with Asiatics at Tell el-Dab‘a as providing impetus for the transfer of Asiatic traditions to Egypt in the late Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period.Aleksandra Ksiezak discusses the petrographic analyses conducted on the Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware pottery from Tell el-Maskhuta. Tell el-Maskhuta was an important seasonal encampment located southeast of Tell el-Dab‘a, at the eastern end of the Wadi Tumilat. A University of Toronto team under the leadership of John S. Holladay, Jr., excavated the site in the late 1970s and 80s. The corresponding settlement at the western end of the wadi, Tell el-Retaba, was originally excavated by W. M. Flinders Petrie and is now under investigation by a joint Polish-Slovak archaeological mission. Caravans from southern Palestine and Sinai passed by these two places on their way to Tell el-Dab‘a and other settlements in the Eastern Delta. In stratigraphic terms, Tell el-Maskhuta relates to Tell el-Dab‘a Strata E/3–D/2–1; historically, it fits within the Hyksos period. Over the years, specialists have published the scarabs and flat-bottomed cooking pots from Tell el-Maskhuta (Ben-Tor 2007: 66–68, Appendix Plates 1–2; Klassen 2015), but a final site report is still lacking. Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware was produced in the Levant as well as Egypt in the early second millennium BC. Ksiezak shows that the Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware at Tell el-Maskhuta is of local manufacture and mostly made of a single fabric type that is similar to that used for the ware at Tell el-Retaba but different from the fabric employed to produce stylistically similar pottery at Tell el-Dab‘a. The distinctive composition of the ware manufactured in the Wadi Tumilat provides an excellent example of small-scale regionalization in the Hyksos period.Cydrisse Cateloy traces the development in shape and capacity of the whole or nearly whole Levantine Middle and Late Bronze Age amphorae found at Tell el-Dab‘a. She classifies these two-handled vessels, also known as “Canaanite jars,” into a dozen groups (labeled A–L). The pots in the earlier groups are smaller and more ovoid in shape and have a limited capacity, while those forming the later groups are taller and more piriform and have a larger capacity. Eventually, the amphorae develop the distinctive form that appears in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC and has a long, tapering body and carinated shoulder. There is also a small group of miniature amphorae (Cateloy's Group K), which appears in the last phase of the Middle Bronze Age. The Canaanite jar was specifically designed for maritime transport and was a critical element in the development of east Mediterranean maritime trade.Regarding the origin of the Canaanite jars, Cateloy references the petrographic analyses performed by Anat Cohen-Weinberger and Yuval Goren (2004) on some of the Canaanite jars in linking many of these Middle Bronze Age vessels to the northern Levantine coast. This reflects the “corporate” view of many members of the Tell el-Dab‘a project team that the analyses by Cohen-Weinberger and Goren yielded the right conclusion about where the bulk of these vessels were produced, while the Neutron Activation Analyses (NAA) performed earlier on many of the same pots (McGovern 2000) reached the wrong conclusion in claiming that from the late MB IIA period through MB IIB and C, most of the amphorae at Tell el-Dab‘a came from southern Palestine. Archaeologists associated with the Tell el-Dab‘a project have long cited the petrographic analyses to the nearly total exclusion of the NAA results. This undoubtedly reflects the view of Bietak, who has referred to the petrographic results as support for his contention that the origin of the Hyksos is to be sought in the northern Levant. Cohen-Weinberger and Goren asserted that serious methodological and database problems beset Patrick McGovern's work. Now McGovern and a geological collaborator, Christopher Wnuk, in an extended version of McGovern's 2000 publication that appeared in 2020 (McGovern and Wnuk 2020; see especially Wnuk's remarks on pp. 278–302), have lodged a wide range of criticisms against the work of the petrographers. It is not the reviewer's place to render judgment on whose methodology, statistical analysis, and scientific expertise are superior/inferior. The reviewer is not competent to judge the technical merits of the competing experts—nor for that matter are most, if not all, of the archaeologists who have chosen to accept the petrographic results. It is enough to say that the view that Tell el-Dab‘a maintained significant maritime relations with the northern Levant from the Middle Kingdom all the way to the end of the Second Intermediate Period is not a settled matter. There are good archaeological reasons to support a southern Levantine source for the jars—for example, the geographical distribution of Hyksos royal-name and private-name-and-title scarabs (see below).Vilain writes on the imported Cypriot pottery found at Tell el-Dab‘a, especially that labeled White Painted Pendent Line Style, as well as the locally produced versions of the latter. White Painted Pendent Line Style imports appear from Stratum G/1-3 to D/2—that is, from the late Middle Kingdom to the end of the Hyksos Period—while the local specimens have a slightly more restricted stratigraphic range—from Stratum E/3 down to D/2—that is, only during the Second Intermediate Period. Imitations include vessels that have the shape and overall decoration of the imports but are made from Nile clay. There are also vessels that have a Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware shape common in Egypt and the Levant but reveal decoration “influenced” by that found on Cypriot White Painted Pendent Line Style pottery. The mixing of various ceramic forms and decorative styles in the White Painted Pendent Line Style pottery found at Tell el-Dab‘a reflects the complex blending of Cypriot, Levantine, and local cultural influences at the site that makes it at once so fascinating but also so challenging to understand.The human remains from Tell el-Dab‘a are the subject of three fairly short papers from researchers affiliated with Bournemouth University, the University of Southampton, and the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman. The three papers are largely introductory in nature, explaining the analytical techniques available for the study of the human remains. As the bioarchaeological research was evidently in an early stage when the three papers were prepared, the authors present no conclusions about the materials being studied. The essay by Nina Maaranen, Holger Schutkowski, Sonia Zakrzewski, Chris Stantis, and Albert Zink introduces nondestructive biodistance analysis, dental nonmetric trait variation, geometric morphometrics, biomolecular analysis, strontium and oxygen isotope analysis, and DNA analysis. In a separate paper, Maaranen, Schutkowski, and Zakrzewski go into further detail on the application of biodistance analysis to study familial relationships and the origin of the Hyksos.The contribution by Stantis and Schutkowski on “Stable Isotope Analysis to Investigate Hyksos Identity and Origins” is the essay to which anyone interested in where the Asiatics at Tell el-Dab‘a originated will be drawn. Stantis and Schutkowski discuss in greater detail the application of strontium isotope analysis to the teeth coming from skeletons excavated at Tell el-Dab‘a. They focus on the goals and methods of the study and the comparative materials available from other sites along the Nile in Egypt and Sudan; they point out that no strontium data exist from the Eastern or Western Desert, or Sinai Peninsula.Three decades ago, a pair of anthropologists, Eike-Meinrad Winkler and Harald Wilfing (1991), of the University of Vienna, published a study of the skeletal remains of some 247 individuals from Area A. Bietak (1996: 36) summarized the results of their study as follows: “The male population of the late Middle Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period at Tell el-Dab‘a was not of Egyptian origin. The closest physical affinities are to be found within the population of the Levant, a very close similarity being noted to the inhabitants of the Iron Age cemetery at Kamid el-Loz. It is interesting that the female population type is very different and seems to have been of local origin. The social pattern of male immigrants acquiring local wives is typical for mercenaries or sailors in employment abroad.” The strontium isotope analysis results have now appeared in a paper published in PLOS ONE (Stantis et al. 2020), where the conclusions reached by Winkler and Wilfing are turned on their head. Now, while the data not unexpectedly show that there was greater migration to Tell el-Dab‘a in pre-Hyksos times, they also indicate that “more females are non-locals compared to males” (Stantis et al. 2020: 8). Hence, “the greater proportion of non-local females compared to males could fit with patrilocality in Egypt and the Near East, but this rather high proportion of 77% of females as non-local deserves more careful contextual consideration” (Stantis et al. 2020: 10). This is a remarkable turnabout. What does this infer about the usefulness of the results published in earlier bioarchaeological studies of ancient Near Eastern populations? In any event, if the new data are right, they throw a wrench into the gears of Bietak's theory of a northern origin for the Hyksos.Hendrik Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht present a suite of 22 high-precision radiocarbon assays obtained from short-lived samples associated with Middle and Late Bronze Age contexts at Ashkelon. They compare the results to a radiocarbon dataset from Tell el-Dab‘a that was published back in 2012. They refrain from calibrating any of the dates due to the impending publication of IntCal19, the new International Radiocarbon Calibration Curve (eventually published in the journal Radiocarbon as IntCal20), since the 2019 curve was expected to be more accurate than the 2013 curve. Barely mentioned is the fact that the Ashkelon and Tell el-Dab‘a radiocarbon dates, when calibrated using even the 2013 curve, are significantly earlier—to the tune of 100–120 years—than the dates for the relevant strata based on the archaeological materials. Needless to say, employing the high dates yields a very different history of the Asiatic settlement in the Delta and the rise of the Hyksos. Bruins and van der Plicht's paper is mentioned in only two other places in the volume: Bietak's Preface and his Concluding Remarks (in the latter case, rather obliquely); it is completely ignored by the authors of the individual contributions. The reviewer, like Bietak, does not believe the radiocarbon chronology reflects archaeological and historical reality, but he is nonetheless surprised that none of the authors reference the Tell el-Dab‘a dates. In fact, the Hyksos Enigma Project website makes no mention of chronology as a component of the research project.The volume's last two papers discuss network analysis employing digital graphs to study regionalization in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (Arianna Sacco) and depthmap analysis for interpreting the development of the late Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period settlement levels in Area A/II at Tell el-Dab‘a and the Early Bronze Age town levels at Byblos (Silvia Gómez Senovilla). Sacco's study of Second Intermediate Period beads suggests that Tell el-Dab‘a in Lower Egypt was “in more direct contact” with the Memphis-Fayyum area and Dakhla oasis than with Abydos, Tod, and Edfu in Upper Egypt. Neither Sacco nor Lilyquist refers to the other's paper, which is unfortunate, since the two papers nicely complement each other. Gómez Senovilla's paper focuses on the development of Area A/II at Tell el-Dab‘a from Stratum H in the late Twelfth Dynasty to Stratum E/1 in the middle Hyksos period. She examines the semi-grid layout of the settlement, with its main and subsidiary streets, cul-de-sacs, temple compounds, and cemeteries, together with changes in integration and connectivity within the town, through the various strata. In contrast to the situation at Tell el-Dab‘a, Gómez Senovilla sees the town of Byblos as developing around a central well, the broad-room houses of EB II giving way to the middle-room houses in the expanding town of EB III. The studies of Sacco and Gómez Senovilla both involve the use of specialized computer software; on a practical level, many older archaeologists will find these investigatory techniques require computer skills beyond their capabilities and will therefore leave them to those more adept at computer graphics (i.e., their graduate students).After reading the papers in this publication, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that nearly everything in the Levant that significantly impacts on the rise of the Hyksos is to be sought in the northern Levant. Only a small number of papers pay attention to Palestine for any point during the Middle Bronze Age. Admittedly, many of the papers presented at the two workshops focused on the earlier phases of Asiatic settlement at Tell el-Dab‘a, when the Syrian and Mesopotamian influences were most prominent. Nonetheless, one cannot escape the impression that Bietak's arguments for a northern origin of the Hyksos phenomenon dominate the thinking of the Hyksos Enigma Project members.While the principal strengths of this publication lie in its exposition of Syrian and Mesopotamian cultural influences on the Asiatic community that developed at Tell el-Dab‘a, and of Tell el-Dab‘a's significance as a major maritime hub in the east Mediterranean, the question still has to be asked whether the northern Levant is more important than Palestine for understanding the historical phenomenon known as the Hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty. As the volume has little in the way of discussion of the artifactual evidence pertaining to the Hyksos rulers and no mention of the materials relating to the Hyksos kings and officials found in Palestine (especially southern Palestine), the average reader may not realize that for some archaeologists, including the reviewer and Daphna Ben-Tor, it is Tell el-Dab‘a's connections with southern Palestine, not the northern Levant, that is critical for understanding the rise of the Hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty (see, e.g., Weinstein 1981; Ben-Tor 2011). How is it that there are more than three dozen scarabs inscribed with the names of Hyksos rulers scattered around Palestine—mostly from sites in southern Palestine—while there are no such objects coming from the northern Levant … None! The same is true of the small number of seal amulets naming officials associated with the Hyksos administration. Moreover, all of the scarabs naming the local rulers of Byblos date from the late Middle Kingdom, after which such objects disappear. The close relationship between Egypt and Byblos, and between Egypt and the rest of the northern Levant, pretty much ended prior to the beginning of the seventeenth century BC—that is, before the time of the Fifteenth Dynasty. The story of the Hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty, based on the scarabs and perhaps the NAA data, is that of a line of local rulers at Tell el-Dab‘a with significant political and commercial connections to southern Palestine. To date, the Enigma of the Hyksos project has revealed the northern Levantine background of the Asiatic community at Tell el-Dab‘a. Whether that background also explains the history of the Hyksos kings of the Fifteenth Dynasty remains to be seen.