ABSTRACT
THE events which led Egypt to the proud position of dominance among the nations which she manifestly occupied at the time when the story of Amarna b~gins were the direct outcome of the greatest humiliation which ever befell the land-the Hyksos usurpation. In after days the Egyptians looked back with shame and loathing to the time when foreign kings sat upon the throne of the Pharaohs. Reference to it was made as seldom as possible, and when it was made it was in terms of disgust, which showed how deeply the iron had entered into the soul of the nation. Thus Queen Hatshepsut, in her inscription at Speos Artemidos, refers to the senseless desolation which the invaders had wrought: "I have restored that which was ruins. I have raised up that which was unfinished since the Asiatics were in the midst of A varis of the Northland, and the barbarians were in the midst of them, overthrowing that which was made, while they ruled in ignorance of Ra." I t is now becoming evident that this great disaster was just one phase of the widespread readjustment of the nations which followed upon the descent of the Indo-Europeans from the Oxusland, somewhere round about 2000 B.C. The invaders brought with them the horse and the war-chariot, and the less highly equipped Semites of Babylonia and Naharina
were unable to stand before them. By 1746 B.C. the Kassite Dynasty of Aryan rulers was established in Babylon, and at the same time the Aryan rule was set up in the land within the great bend of the Euphrates, which the Egyptians named Naharina. Here the kingdom of Mitanni, with which the connections of Egypt in later days were to be so intimate, came into beinga kingdom of horse-using Aryan barons ruling over a subject Semitic people.
