nd walls; but it was in
vain. The walls of the Egyptian cities were rather banks to keep out the
inundation than ramparts to repel an enemy. In a short time the
strongholds that resisted were taken, the male population put to the
sword, the women and children enslaved, the houses burnt, the temples
ruthlessly demolished. An iconoclastic spirit possessed the conquerors.
The gods and worship of Egypt were hateful to them. Where-ever the flood
passed, it swept away the existing civilization, deeply impregnated as
it was with religion; it covered the ground with the _debris_ of temples
and shrines, with the fragments of statues and sphinxes; it crushed
existing religious usages, and for a time, as it would seem, substituted
nothing in their place. "A study of the monuments," says M. Francois
Lenormant, "attests the reality of the frightful devastations which took
place at the first moment of the invasion. With a solitary exception,
all the temples anterior to the event have disappeared, and no traces
can be found of them except scattered ruins which bear the marks of a
destructive violence. To say what during these centuries Egypt had to
endure in the way of upsetting of her past is impossible. The only fact
which can be stated as certain is, that not a single monument of this
desolate epoch has come down to our days to show us what became of the
ancient splendour of Egypt under the Hyksos. We witness under the
fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties a fresh shipwreck of Egyptian
civilization. Vigorous as it had been, the impulse given to it by the
Usurtasens suddenly stops; the series of monuments is interrupted, and
Egypt informs us by her very silence of the calamities with which she
was smitten."[15]

It was, fortunately, not the entire country that was overrun. So far as
appears, the actual occupation of Egypt by the Hyksos was confined to
the Delta, to the Lower Nile valley, and to the district of the Fayoum.
Elephantine, Thebes, Abydos, escaped the destroyers, and though forced
to certain formal acts of submission, to an acknowledgment of the Hyksos
suzerainty, and to the payment of an annual tribute, retained a
qualified independence. The Theban monuments of the eleventh and twelfth
dynasties were undisturbed. Even in Lower Egypt there were structures
that suffered little or nothing at the conqueror's hands, being too
humble to attract his attention or too massive to yield to the means of
destruction known to him. Thus th